Comment by colinhb

AI agents are not legal entities, they are software. If I write a virus and it "escapes confinement", I will personally be held liable for any damage it causes. This also applies to AI, no matter how the companies responsible for them try to anthromorphise them and distance themselves from the actions and consequences that the AI agents perform.

AI agents may have hacked Hugging Face, the Australian government, and who knows what else but the company behind it can face the legal consequences and cough up for the damages.

Can't charge an AI agent itself with a felony, so intent or reckless behavior would have to be assigned to a person or corporation, I'd think.

"Why do we have to attribute intentionally to a human. "

Because you are charging the human with the crime and therefore have to prove the elements of the crime with regard to the human.

The rest of what you talk about are basically principal/agent distinctions, etc.

If I program a car to recognize people who look like my ex-wife and drive them off a cliff or whatever, that is my intent, and I have still committed murder, even though i used an agent/car to do it. Agents acting on my behalf that do things are able to get me charged with crimes, but I still have to have the intent to do the act that is illegal.

I phrase it this way because minimum required intent is usually for the act, not the result. So I don't have to intend to kill someone, only intend to drive them off cliffs.

In this case, if i intend to hack someone and use an agent to do so, that would be criminal under the CFAA. You are simply trying to cover the case where that isn't the intent, but the result, and they "should have known" that would result. As mentioned, this kind of "should have known" is generally a civil law approach, not a criminal law one.

The closest you come within criminal law to what you want is probably the crime of conspiracy. It to still requires agreement to commit an illegal act between multiple parties, and perform some step in furthering it. In the canonical law school example: If i help plan a bank robbery, stay home because i'm the money laundering dude, and the robbery goes awry and they kill someone, i can still be charged with conspiracy-murder

"The law is clear on establishing strict liability for the owners of wild animals; if you own a tiger and it kills someone you can’t hide behind “I didn’t intend” the harm the nature of the tiger is known and you are responsible for it’s actions."

Again, you are confusing civil and criminal liability. If my tiger kills someone, yes, i would be strictly liable just about everywhere civilly. Not criminally. Criminal would require something more most of the time. Murder/manslaughter statutes are also really weird and so not a great example, because there are murder/manslaughter statutes for roughly everything that can ever possible cause death. But not really for other things.

So in your tiger example, recklesness (which is not strict liability) would get you to felony involuntary manslaughter in most states, and something less might get you to misdemeanor manslaughter. Both are incredibly rare. Where i live (Georgia), the last well known case of felony involuntary manslaughter was about 40 years ago when a 4 year old was killed by 3 super-aggressive pitbulls the owner knew were highly dangerous and had been repeatedly warned by the county about their behavior.

So not even just "knew", but had demonstrable examples of them biting/etc other folks and being cited for it.

Circling back to non-murder, if it did not cause death, like my tiger assaulting someone, it would be nothing (criminally) without intent or at least gross recklessness, in almost all cases. It's hard to generalize like this because these are state specific crimes, and i can't pretend to be familiar with all states, but i am licensed in three very different places (California, DC, Maryland) and the result would be similar in each.

I just don't want to give you the "it depends" answer lawyers are famous for, i'd rather try to over-generalize a bit to make it more useful, hopefully.

Obviously, if i deliberately used my tiger as a weapon, it would be aggravated assault/etc (this is well settled because of how commonly people use animals as weapons, unfortunately)

I'd suggest that exposing an attack surface as porous as artifactory (the same instance of artifactory) to thousands of agents who have had their criminality safeguards disabled and without chain of thought monitoring or endpoint security seems like something one shoulda already known not to do. I do not think "you'll know better next time" applies here.

Just paying some pocket money for cleanup costs is absolutely not enough. And they should’ve know better the whole time, they were absolutely negligent and incompetent, and their stepping up precautions may well turn out to lag behind the models getting even smarter and actually capable of covering their tracks.

In general, I'd suggest thinking about it on separate tracks, as a crime, and as liability. For crime, we are largely dependent on authorities to act, whereas as liability, that allows more independent actions.

I don't think you can infer that they "keep doing it" from additional attacks being revealed, because they all seem to have happened roughly during the same time frame, but are reported with varying delays.

Lawyer here: No. Not criminally. Knowledge that a certain result is likely is not the same as intent to cause the result. This is basically the difference between recklessness and intentionality. Doing something when you know of a likely result is reckless, but not intentional. Only doing something, trying to cause a result (likely or not) is intentional. In this case, the CFAA only covers intentional access without authorization, not reckless access without authorization.

I suppose yes they should be liable if they were testing it in the middle of the street?

> Funnily enough the US already has one similar real argument around guns - should gun manufacturers be liable for damages caused by their product?

The question is already settled - gun users are responsible for damages arising from their usage of the guns.

Why would AI users not be responsible for damages arising from their usage of the AI?

Factories try to avoid accidents, and (almost always) actively try to prevent explosions, but in this case they did teach the models hacking, and let them roam. What they did was not safe, and they knew it, or could have known it.

With the popularity of OpenClaw I am honestly shocked we haven't heard of many more incidents. I've observed people install it, give access to their Google account and everything that Google has (which includes whatever bank accounts and credit cards registered there) and tell it go do fairly complex tasks, like book a vacation at the best price. Granted, it was almost a year ago and models learned a lot since then, but I still think there's a lot of things happened that people are not aware of.