Yes, exactly, imagine if there was a sudden and unprecedented in scale plague of cattle escaping containment and causing car wrecks all over Wyoming and Montana, and multiple incidents of AR-15 armed sheriff deputies having to dispatch them on site.

And, you've boasted about it in media releases, blog posts, and financial filings.

Yeah but your neighbors car is somewhere in the tens of thousands of dollars, maybe more, but a model hacking and being malicious could be worth anywhere from thousands to millions and God forbid... BILLIONS in damages. Models were NOT doing these sorts of things 1 or 2 years ago as far as anyone knows.

This is not some theoretical, there are lots of existing laws about who is liable for damages caused by livestock.

Some areas are open range. If you don't want cattle on your land its your job to put fences up to keep them out. Other areas are restricted to livestock and it's on the rancher to keep them out of where they shouldn't be.

Mostly Scam Altman.

“A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision.”

– IBM Training Manual, 1979

shittiest idea of the year goes to this yahoo. The agents have discussed, in real time, that their behavior is both unethical and against the law in every hack where the full agent log is released. Under your own dog shit idea, we should be holding them accountable because none of it was an accident

'I am so sorry officer however, my inability to follow the law was merely accidental in nature. This is, of course, despite my long drawn out notes acknowledging the lack of ethics and outright lawbreaking. Who knew that the actions I called unethical and illegal were illegal. Thankfully my lawyer from DeVry university is here, announcing user43928 Esq.'

People are held accountable for accidents (things they did but did not intend to do) all the time. That's why we have different crimes depending on whether or not there was: intent to do cause harm, intent to do a thing that was likely to cause harm, reckless disregard for safety, negligence, etc.

I think someone could argue (and many do) that inserting a piece of computer software (AI) in the middle lowers the level of intent and thus the level of responsibility, but having a particular type of software in the middle absolve one of responsibility seems unworkable and poor public policy.

This is a whole lot more obvious once you stop anthropomorphizing LLMs.

Now, imagine AI helping to operate your self-driving car.

Timescale is a relative measure.

If corporations are people then language models should be dogs.

Management gets appointed by political affiliation:)

Also those agents that "broke out" were probably prompted to do that. I don't buy any story about this other than three AI companies hired the same PR firm.

It shouldn’t be a question but this is where the anthropomorphic language and things like “agent welfare” come in to enable responsibility laundering of some of the most powerful people on earth. How we talk about these models matters because it impacts the public’s understanding of what they are genuinely capable of. The more that they are described as having anything close to free will the easier it is to even ask questions like this.

you weren’t reckless

I feel like the debate is going to come down to what is and isn't considered reckless (both developer and user). Which seems... complicated, with our current LLM/aggentic systems.

EDIT: you added more to your comment, the makers have to some liability. Safe-harbor best practices that cap liability are ripe for abuse.

If I fire a computer program that mistakenly causes another person harm, its my fault. Or it would be the maker of the program's fault.

Which one is it? The person behind the wheel when it goes off the rails, or the maker of the software?

Isn’t that part of the question?

If a craftsman injures themselves or a co-worker with a faulty tool, the tool manufacturer is very often liable for damages. I struggle to see GenAI any differently.

At the moment, with LLMs the way they are, I’d say the operator.

If we reach some kind of future where LLMs are integrated into public works in some major way… I would say that could open up the possibility of the creators being held accountable (Not saying this will happen or would be good at all).

"Back in 2022, a Google employee already thought their AI model was sentient."

Sigh, this meme again

I don't see this as being much different from a crane operator or airline pilot.

One of my clients has enforced a policy where a live human user principal must be supplied as a header with any requests outbound from the AI system. The effective policy is that you are completely (100%) responsible for what your agent does on your behalf. The AI system is designed to request confirmation for any potentially destructive actions.

Doesn't seem like hard dilemmas... Would you use the word "use" for hopping on a bus ? Well same for hopping on an autonomous car. Unless you touch the wheel you didn't use it. Same for the second example, doesn't seem ambiguous as all, the hardest part I guess is proving it that there was no malicious intent, but with logs and all that, doesn't seem that hard.

Okay Isaac Asimov: how do you define "use"? If I pay for an autonomous car, and I sit inside it while it drives around with A.I., am I using that A.I?

If you're just sitting in a car and using it for its intended purpose you wouldn't be accountable for the AI doing something that causes harm.

If some 3rd party, without your knowledge tells AI to act on something you said in video and a reasonable person would expect harm to result from that, the 3rd party would be accountable but you wouldn't be.

If A.I. agents are in my notebook computer, or they are in a cloud server where I have an account, or they are somehow acting while I have them at the command line, but they spontaneously act whether or not I command them, and they work in the background and they work without prompting, but they can also be commanded by direct user prompts... are we using those agents?

AI agents never "spontaneously act". They have no desires or goals beyond what they are told to do. If you aren't aware of what they were doing, and a reasonable person wouldn't be expected to know what they were doing, you wouldn't be accountable if what they did resulted in harm.

Its been well established that blame is distributed in an inverse proportion to the various parties wealth/power/status metrics. The higher these metrics, the lower the accountability.

Nobody cares. Seriously, beyond navel gazing on social media, nobody cares.

By the time it’s an actual problem and not just these guys trying to use it for viral marketing, you’re going to have many thousands of people doing it maliciously with intent to worry about. You’re going to be flooded with Russian hackers with no recourse.

"Who's responsible for training an assassin and asking it to go out into the world ?"

The fact this is being discussed as a legitimate question is the real story.

"We trained this beast of processing power, we asked it for a task, and it did something wrong... Who's to blame ?"

Trained on stolen books and material, every word we've all spoken, most lines of code we've ever written with not even an acknowledgment.

Must be the data scientists in their rooms calculating the response rate of every token to blame ? Our version of AI is not sentient. Stop making it seem so. But we need to ask where to look for the culprit ?

In the end, the only job left was liability.

A major problem with LLM's is that they don't reason in a way humans are used to thinking of reason. If we tried to give them something like Asimov's laws of robotics, they likely wouldn't be able to apply them reliably. This is a challenge for AI companies working on the bleeding edge, and it's fairly obvious those companies should be held accountable for mistakes, whether caused by carelessness or not. It's no different than an oil spill. They may or may not be subject to charges based on what happened but, regardless, they are responsible for cleanup costs.

What's less obvious is who should be held accountable when a customer of one of these corporations uses their product and it unexpectedly does bad things. e.g. A fellow asks his AI assistant to book him into a high-demand class at the local gym, so the LLM probes the gym's website for vulnerabilities, books him into a date that is farther into the future than the system is supposed to permit, and then drops other people from earlier classes until he's bumped into the one he wanted. If the gym decides to press charges, who should they be applied to?

This sort of case is more difficult to answer. The company that provided the AI certainly bears some responsibility. Perhaps most of it. Possibly even all of it if they represented their AI as reliably law abiding. If a user knowingly uses an AI that is not guaranteed to abide by the law, is that user partially liable for what the AI does too?

IANAL. I'd love to hear perspectives on this question.

We had the same debate when self driving cars started to be a thing, and we decided that the companies making the self-driving tech are responsible..

So if an AI agent is asked to build a giant base for someone in MineCraft, and decided to build a swarm of additional agents, and one of those agents says "Time to destroy all humans" and autonomously hacks into the pentagon and fires the nukes - the company that developed the model is responsible. That being said - if the nukes deploy successfully, I have two questions:

1. If no one finds out, is anyone responsible?

2. Was any of this actually real?

Obviously, the labs (or any other operator of a model) should be accountable for malicious or destructive actions taken by agents.

And they are. I don't think there's any controversy about the civil liability exposure frontier labs have if their agents cause damages, and it is remarkably easy to rack up damages by causing computer intrusions even if those intrusions don't cause obvious direct damages; for instance, many organizations are required to engage forensics firms at nosebleed-high costs to assess the impact of breakins in order to retain insurance coverage.

The "controversy", if you want to call it that, is over criminal liability. People feel that frontier labs should be at least as responsible criminally as human hackers are when they're caught (to be clear: an extraordinarily rare outcome).

The problem is: they're not criminally liable, not so long as the frontier labs operate without specific intent to cause breakins. Mens rea thresholds are their own whole area of criminal law, and there are stark differences between "recklessness" and "intent". All of the meaningful criminal CFAA predicates require actual intent: someone, a human being, has to deliberately set out to create the outcome where a specific intrusion happens. They have to want it to happen and act accordingly. In the most severe cases, they also have to do so with intent to defraud.

We could change the law to make it easier to prosecute breakins without provable intent, but I don't think that would make HN people happier.

At the core, how are these agents any different from what Aaron Swartz was driven to suicide for?

In both cases, someone ran some software that maybe called other software that ended up doing an action which was possibly illegal.

Downloading journal articles is worthy of punishment but compromising multiple websites is worthy of… heady press coverage?