Comment by GMoromisato
17 days ago
I don't think this is a moral/ethical issue--everyone agrees that the frontier labs are responsible for hacking attempts. No one is trying to deflect blame.
Instead, this is a legal question: What were the damages? Was the target company negligent in setting up security? Were criminal laws broken? Etc. [IANAL, so forgive the lack of precision.]
If hacked companies had losses, they have an incentive (even a fiduciary duty) to recoup their losses. They do that by suing the company (as, e.g., authors sued Anthropic for copyright infringement). If they haven't sued the company, it means either (a) they didn't have losses, or (b) they're still working on the lawsuit and haven't filed it yet.
The other dynamic is that frontier labs feel competitive pressure to take risks to develop their models. Which risk is higher:
A. A new model being tested hacks into a sensitive site (bank, government, etc.) and the company has to pay a massive fine (or even face jail time).
B. A competitor comes out with a significantly better model and they lose significant market share.
That is a hard choice to make. The frontier labs are asking for government restrictions--that apply to all companies--so that they can minimize A without having to worry about B.
They are trying to minimize their risk (and thus maximize their profits).
Personally - I think this issue is hysteria. I do not believe anyone is trying to shirk their responsibility by blaming their software.
But I could be wrong.
Can anyone show me an example? And I mean a real example - not an inferred example. Someone saying "It wasn't me, it was my AI" or someone not being held responsible for the actions of their AI.
I won't hold my breath.
EDIT: Heh... no examples. I rest my case.
Agreed!
The argument from the frontier labs isn't, "We're worried that AI is going out of control, please stop us" it is, "We're taking a lot of risks to compete, so please limit competition."
It’s funny because you wrote this with AI and then tried to slop-launder it. But we can still tell. Can’t fool a sloprunner.
Ah yes - paranoia along with hysteria.
> everyone agrees that the frontier labs are responsible for hacking attempts. No one is trying to deflect blame.
No, they really don't. I suppose I agree to some extent that no one is trying (hard) to deflect blame, because the people in control are barely a part of the conversation in the first place.
Almost all of the reporting on these stories assigns the blame to the chatbots first. Most prominently through the language/wording that gets used -- it's usually e.g. "BOT infiltrated ...", "Agents ruined the ...". I mean, they call them agents. I'm not trying to claim this terminology was selected as an entirely strategic move, but it sure does seem convenient. Calling them agents shifts the conversation away from the real human people and companies that are controlling them. This extends well beyond this one word, as well. The (captured) media picks up on and adopts the language used by the tech/AI companies.[0] In this way (among others) these companies can influence how the media portrays them indirectly.
> Instead, this is a legal question
There are legal questions, but the two (legal, ethical) aren't mutually exclusive. The criminal law question is the most significant one here, I think. If you do what they did as an individual, you are pretty likely to get visited by the FBI.
You're skipping over a couple of important points, I think:
- The AI labs clearly stand to benefit from the "AI is dangerous narrative". We know this for several reasons, probably the most significant one is that they keep telling us how the new one is super extremely dangerous, and proceeding to make no changes to their behaviour. It's marketing.
- The AI labs are clearly in control of their bots. It's a computer. Networks are not mysterious. Computers don't do surprising things. The principles and technologies involved in securing a network are mature and there is a ready supply of trained workers available worldwide, keen to apply those principles and deploy/manage those technologies. You can believe that something went wrong and the various hacks and excursions were unexpected. In that case, the labs are clearly incompetent[1] and also, they're still to blame. Repeatedly running "experiments" that you can't control is, in fact, a failure of basic morals and ethics.
[0] Of course they do, right? Well there used to be a distinction made between experts and marketing departments. These days it seems a lot of journalists think that marketing copy is as good as any other source.
[1] Surely they hired someone that can setup a firewall.
> The AI labs are clearly in control of their bots. It's a computer. Networks are not mysterious.
Yes, exactly. The issue isn't, "we don't know how to sandbox an agent", the issue is that they need to test the agent with full internet access because that's the product they are selling. They are selling a product that does things for you on the web. You have to be able to test it with a real web connection.
Maybe the answer is to simulate the web. What if you ask an agent to reproduce the key parts of the web (travel sites, government sites, etc.); effectively, clone a real, working version of the web, but inside a simulator. Now you could test the agents inside the simulator. Since "coding is a solved problem" maybe that wouldn't be as hard as it sounds. Right?