- 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.
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.