- cross-posted to:
- programming@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- programming@programming.dev
US Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson said on Friday he would resist describing AI agents as autonomous actors that “break loose” with “wills and desires of their own,” suggesting the developers who instruct agents would be the ones liable for harm.
“I’m going to continue as long as I am chairman to resist this anthropomorphizing of these tools,” Ferguson said at the Reuters Momentum AI Austin event. “If someone tells a tool to do something, and the tool does it, I don’t think we would say, ‘Oh, what do we do about the tool?’”
Ferguson’s remarks illustrated potential avenues for the Trump administration to take as incidents rise in which agentic AI testing resulted in unauthorized access to corporate or government data.
This is the first sensible proposal for regulating AI that I have ever heard. Make the chucklefucks who are unleashing this horror directly responsible for their bullshit.
Chat GPT hacks a government website? 5 years in jail for Altman. Claude agent deletes someone’s database? Amodei gets the bill to fix it.
All AI bullshit stops over night.
Unfortunately the Corporate Veil exists in the US (and most other) legal systems. I personally believe that this is a major root for all of the bullshit we have to deal with on a daily basis. You kill someone, you go to prison. A company has shitty safety intentionally to save money and someone dies, nobody sees prison. CEOs always say they deserve the money because they take the risk… Let’s make that very true.
The entire board should be held accountable and share the punishments, otherwise they still have their fall guy.
This isn’t even regulation. The floor is not being distracted by morons shouting “it’s alive!” whilst robbing you and pointing to a computer. “Arrest that computer officer! It did all the bad things!”
Or its just another way for the government to prosecute you and strip you of your resources. I’m SURE that no one will be unjustly punished over something their AI did.
This causes a nationwide depression in the US which probably infects the world. Also criminal liability doesn’t normally attach to unintended wrongs AND we don’t normally make CEOs directly responsible for all possible wrongs committed by any one of potentially hundreds of thousands of employees because that would be … nonsense.
For every complex problem there is a simple stupid and wrong solution.
Those are the models. An agent is a harness around the model.
So if this goes through I could use opencode with GPT and… Which one is at fault, Opencode or OpenAI? What if I also modify Opencode’s system prompt as a joke to make it as unhelpful as possible and forget I did it, am I at fault or is it still Altman who goes to jail if I now let it delete my production database?
As I understand it, it’s the person running it, so if you let an agent fuck something up, YOU are at fault, not the developer of the model or the tool. You’re the one who gave the task. You have the ability to block harmful commands if you don’t go yolo mode and actually read what it’s doing.
i think both the developer using the agent should be liable for deliberate misuse, but the company that provides a dangerous model with broken guard rails should also be liable.
Everyone in the situation that is supplying that hardware is a good start or baseline.