Comment by dasil003

Yes, like pretty much everything else, there is gray area. We can have split liabilities for different aspects of these failures. It's long been the case that people may not know what's running on their computers (botnets, etc), and I would argue there should be some form liability for your computer being used to do bad things. It should be proportionate and obviously a lot less than the principals. But keep in mind these rogue AI agents can't just hang out on someone's personal hardware, they need a lot of compute.

The missing piece right now is that our AI safety and cybersecurity controls are simply not up to snuff with the current risks that AI has introduced. Given the increased risk, we need to level up every aspect of our cybersecurity stance. These are hard problems, but not impossible given proper incentives. The issue is that no one is connecting the dots between the creation of these agents and the tools and access they are given, with the harm they may produce. Often the argument jumps straight to "it's going to get too smart for us to control" while glossing over the fact that all the power AI has was directly given to it by human choices. All this cognitive dissonance and willful blindness is caused by unchecked capitalist incentives. Think of the amount of money every single person in the frontier labs stands to make if the most optimistic predictions pan out. This is moral hazard of the highest order, and the only counter-measure that can work in our current social and political system is liability.