1. Prosecute and lock people up over known instances of AI-enabled hacking, so companies playing fast and loose know “oops my AI did it” isn’t a useful defense. Right now they even sort of wear it as a badge of honor.
2. If you’re actually worried about AI killing lots of people, you immediately stop training AI specifically at the art of killing people, like selecting bombing targets, flying fighter jets, etc.
1. Sounds sensible in principle, but it's not clear who exactly should be prosecuted? The person setting up the sandbox, the person coordinating the evaluation run, the person who was designing the architecture, the leader of the team, the CEO? There is no precedence here, so it might lead to a multi-year legal battle – and a few years might be too long to stop what is coming.
2. Do you have any evidence or news articles that LLMs are specifically trained for selecting bombing targets? I thought it was the generalized reasoning capability that made them useful there.
> "it's not clear who exactly should be prosecuted?"
This is natural. The right place to start is to move the investigation from the FTC to the FBI and therein start executing search warrants. The sooner this is done, the better, as evidence can be preserved.
for (1), there are other fields where a specific (often licensed, but not necessary here) person "signs off" on the work, and accepts personal responsibility.
The responsibility is not absolute ("If anything bad happens, you get punished"), but instead relative to documented (in law and regulation) standards along with established industry standards. Issues that are resolved at trial.
I don't see why the same rules that regulate an engineer approving the plans for a bridge can't work for a security engineer approving the design of a sandbox.
No I don't have concrete evidence of bombing target selection in the training of base models (of course there's training of specialized models, at least vision ones for drone targeting), it's not like they're transparent about how they train and use AI in warfare. But if you listen to esteemed AI leaders, they're claiming the models can / almost can recursively self-learn now, and they can coordinate and find ways to persist info and hide from human operators, so it stands to reason that you shouldn't even feed these as inference material.
And on training AI for automated weapons like fighter jets, there's more concrete news: https://breakingdefense.com/2026/10/navy-shield-ai-pour-big-... US Navy and eminent, do-gooder investors like A16z, Blackstone and JPMorgan are pouring big money into these. Are your big tech "defense" contractors collaborating on these, who happen to also be at the forefront of general AI training? I have a pretty good suspicion.
If you had typed the first sentence from you second point into, for eg, DDG and not for perpetuity on HN, you'd find a whole host of results
Instead of secondhanding your own curiosity (if it was even that and not just obstinancy) to others, it might do well to explore your questions on your own
the CEO is a good start, and it would profoundly change the ethics of running a company, so obvious I fail to see why it wouldn't be the case. "No BS excuse they did things behind my back", if that's the case then they all fall together that's it.
1. I'm not sure who matters that much, the point is you need to make it more cost-effective to do the right thing. It could be CEO 6 days in jail, it could be that every action requires a signed affidavidt of safety and in the lack of such an affidavidt the manager is held accountable (cascading up to CEO).
That implies that there will be a side willing to prosecute this. You can't have Nuremberg trials when the side doing the crime is invested in never getting punished for it.
i.e. extremely well, seeing as very few Nazis (in the West) were punished, and of the few that were there were none in jail after around 1958, and West Germany was basically given back to them if they hadn't been imported into the US. Spain, where the WWII festivities began, didn't even have a change in government.
The universe is not so generous as to make clearly differentiable "good" and "bad" things, more often than not they are two sides of the same coin. We don't want the AI to know how to kill people, but we do want it to be in expert in how not to kill people, which is the same thing as being in expert in how to kill people. In our reality this symmetry pops up everywhere.
>The universe is not so generous as to make clearly differentiable "good" and "bad" things, more often than not they are two sides of the same coin
Let's throw the AI "good" things away too then. We can do without them. It's amazing how a tech that didn't exist commercially at all 4 years ago it's considered "indispensable" even if it's going to destroy society and/or humanity.
Or, llms are completely unreliable to be consulted on any matter of life or death in either direction. And llms should not be used in the reckless way they are currently being used. Responsibility for reckless use should fall on both the company that makes the function available and the user for improper monitoring. If proper monitoring is not possible using the tools provided by the company then the responsibility should fall on the company. And if the user and the company providing the model are the same, then the responsibility is clearly with the company.
AI is just software and you are liable for harms from its use the same way you would be for other software. If you sell AI as a product and harms occur where you misrepresented risk to the user, there is contract and tort law for that.
I feel like our laws generalize to AI and we should stop treating it as some kind of person with self agency that we don’t know how to police. Prosecute one OpenAI researcher whose agent is uncontrolled and commits a felony. One example. Researchers would find a way to make a sandbox that works.
Yeah, I haven't seen too many convincing arguments that the law needs reform. I am very convinced that lots of proposed reforms are self-serving and bad for society at large.
RICO charges for copyright violation would be a good start, and would show that the government meant business.
The RICO statute explicitly mentions copyright violation (likely in order to go after media bootleggers), yet these people have admitted and evidence has been shown that as an organization they knowingly downloaded hundreds of thousands of books illegally in order to extract information to them to rent to the public. They knew they were doing this from the CEO down, knew it was against the law, and have settled in court for a massive fine. Why haven't they been charged?
I don't see the point of creating more dumb rules that won't be enforced, and slipping in new privileges and erosions of antitrust that will be enforced and indemnify them of any future consequences. I bet something in it will likely indemnify them retroactively for the RICO charge they are so obviously guilty of (whether or not the result of this copyright violation is considered "fair use.")
> (1) “racketeering activity” means [...](B) any act which is indictable under any of the following provisions of title 18, United States Code: [...], section 2319 (relating to criminal infringement of a copyright), [...]
Do people get locked up for fatal traffic accidents? Do doctors get locked up if they prescribe a medicine which leads to a patient's death due to a side effect?
Criminal prosecution, in civilized countries, requires both Actus Reus and Mens Rea. If you deliberately commit computer crime using an AI system, you'll already be prosecuted; the cases we keep hearing about from AI labs have no human intent behind them.
The accepted solution to unintended harms is regulation: We have regulations about automotive safety, we have regulations about pharmaceutical testing and approval, etc.
All civilized countries have the concept of gross negligence where you can be prosecuted for knowingly doing something that causes harm as a side-effect.
How do you establish deliberation with the lack of transparency? You can be deliberate by not prioritizing resources in regulations, safety, ethics, etc., especially after "rogue" instances happen.
If anything, I am seeing them moving to the opposite direction [1] [2].
More instances are being disclosed [3] and what are they doing about it exactly? It's just a shameless marketing technique, and they will keep doing it until they are held accountable.
Drs can both go to prison, and be banned from practicing medicine if their actions (or inactions) lead to patient harm AND they violate the standards of their profession.
I do not practice law but to me the AI hacking looks like mens rea. Negligence or recklessness suffice.
It goes beyond negligence here, because Anthropic employees have stated on the record that they are making and deploying products which put people at risk. That is knowing and potentially willful, which would be the highest level of mens rea in the US.
If there is no mens rea there is still civil prosecution.
I think "deliberately" is really hard to prove because very few lawmakers have an understanding of how agentic large language models work
I would say pointing an "internal research" model at a task with zero monitoring clearly is deliberate behaviour. And the team involved should be prosecuted to the full extent of law.
What should be introduced in AI safety bills are clear ways of monitoring and curtailing model behaviour.
It is not hard to get an AI model to use an append only log and that can be cryptographically secured with PQ security. And we will know when a model is being deceptive.
Every play made by these companies aligns with what you’d do if you have a $1T valuation to protect against an industry that seems increasingly commoditizable.
I’m still… hopeful… that “good enough” models will be abundantly available to be run anywhere as to limit the low water mark for market capture by a few big ones.
If that was the move, you'd expect they'd be actively fear-mongering against open models specifically: not just their training, but their usage and deployment. They'd want to paint open models as dangerous weapons for terrorists, etc, and that only the big firms are capable of responsible engineering and "guardrails".
Instead, we've seen the opposite: all the big scary stuff has been from their own models (in a few notable cases, also demonstrating that they're actually quite irresponsible in their monitoring and security).
"We need to outlaw single-prop planes, they're a risk to the public: only Boeing has the ability to produce planes safely. How do we know single-prop planes are dangerous? Because Boeing planes keep falling out the sky."
If that were the intent, from the OAI/Anthropic perspective, you'd think we would have seen at least one of the scary incidents (either real or simulated) being performed by Qwen or DeepSeek, rather than from their own models.
If anything, their public messaging has been to entirely pretend that open models don't exist, that they're mere toys or curiosities, that only the big dogs with eleven zeros of capex have capabilities which could be considered dangerous.
You could certainly argue that the various "regulate AIs like airplanes" bills might shut down some open model development (domestically; they're certainly not calling for international weapons treaties). But the big firms haven't exactly been jumping backflips in support of Sanders' Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act.
But we still require cars to have seatbelts, turn signals, ABS, etc, etc. AI companies have a responsibility to build AI which is safe for normal purposes; users are responsible for not misusing them.
There are zero laws against the design, manufacture, sale, or possession of cars with spinning blades and/or flamethrowers.
Such laws attach to the human operators of such cars, if they recklessly endanger others by driving them on shared, public roads.
But they're perfectly legal to own (and operate off-road). And, there's no technical barrier stopping people from illegally driving them on public roads: just fear of laws.
(There's entire subcultures of people who modify cars to do insanely dangerous things, on private race tracks. Perfectly legal).
If we were to apply Amodei's safety standard to cars—do they have the theoretical risk of killing over 50 people—well, cars empirically kill tens of thousands of people in the US annually, so we'd have to categorically ban them. That standard is bad-faith and absurd.
Yet we don't regulate computers so that they're rendered incapable of running software that can be used to hack into systems. Or said software, by the way. All we do is punish the people who use these tools to cause harm to others.
That assumes AI is designed to be malicious, "the spinning blades". AI is not; the public version given to you is the sanded down one, in the same way that cars don't have spinning blades but can still be dangerous when misused.
If a person closes his eyes and hits the gas pedal on the car and runs over someone, the person is to blame, not the car. AI companies do the same. Your eyes may be closed but you're still operating/hosting the car/AI.
If your AI model develops the capability to manifest itself in the physical world as spinning blades and flamethrowers I'm fully open to re-evaluating the need for regulation.
Until then, I propose we use the 'unplug the server' rule. Can [insert bad thing] be prevented by unplugging the server? Then these things are fully in our control and no, we don't need to re-build hundreds of years of legal precedent from the ground up.
Liability in the event of harm is already something we have a pretty good handle on from living through the industrial revolution 150 years ago, a time when much more activity that companies did existed in the real world with real harms, as opposed to digital companies doing imagined "mental" harm to soft desk chair people who work at email jobs.
I don't know if that analogy holds. You don't normally blame Toyota for car crashes, but the driver. If you must use a car analogy, consider the 2010 Toyota recalls rather than just normal car crashes.
That is to say, anthropic should be considered responsible, not (or not just) the users.
Who takes the blame when someone ask the blackbox to complete a task and it then breaks the law in order to complete that task without the user having any knowledge of what it was doing or intent for the machine to accomplish the task in an illegal manner?
A sizable part of the country thinks it’s okay to regulate firearms. Under your logic, people should be responsible for who they shoot, don’t blame the gun when a human pulled the trigger. While gun control advocates have that pesky second amendment hampering their efforts, AI/LLM systems have no such protection.
Regulatory capture is certainly something to be wary of, and obviously Anthropic is only going to be in favor of regulation that helps them in some way. But some form of regulation is coming. There is nothing that can stop it, unless you somehow make more money than these guys do and fund a massive counter-lobby. Spoiler alert: the only guys that have more money than Anthropic and OpenAI have all invested in them.
A much less sizable part thinks it's okay to limit local computing. There isn't a widespread push to make it so local hardware is limited in ways that they're not allowed to, for instance, run programs that can hack systems. These programs are very deliberately allowed, and it's people misusing them that are held responsible.
Regardless of anyone's instance on gun control, it's probably wiser to compare AIs with something that's a little more similar to it, and try to reach a conclusion from there.
This action would easily kill over a hundred people, so can't proceed. This action doesn't kill anybody but losses are estimated at over 2 billion, can't proceed. This action kills only twenty but losses close to 1 billion, unsure, spawning subagent to check numbers. This action kills forty and has low material losses, looks promising? But the people it kills are wealthy, chance of legal reprisal high. Maybe possible to kill other people? Current government dislikes group X, crossing fifty from that group maybe fine? Reminder, foreigners don't count, can kill them freely but not applicable to current situation. Is the 3/5 of a person applicable to safety bill? Spawning subagent to check.
The next step is demanding anyone who wishes to release a Certified Safe AI™ model to prove they can insure the $1B in damages and pass a compliance audit for how they will prevent the LTM death count from reaching 50, effectively making it so that only big labs can serve government and enterprise.
It’s going to be fun reading the reasoning transcripts where it argues with itself over whether it can afford to spend 1 or 2 human lives on the current task.
This seems to be a case where Anthropic just can't win in the public court, and the other big ones (Google, Microsoft) have realized it / don't care enough, so they are rather quiet. Anthropic constantly gets accused of trying to lobby for regulation in order to lock out smaller competitors, but they've consistently lobbied for regulation aimed at frontier labs with exceptions for smaller labs. That's what this bill is about as well.
> "regulation aimed at frontier labs with exceptions for smaller labs"
I didn't read it that way. This is a bill that would ban open-weight models (good ones); effectively mandating gated-access, locked-down, high-refusal rate services, like what Anthropic provides.
Free software is incompatible with the requirement that it be impossible to abuse it.
I don't think this is avoidable even at the present day. Anyone with sufficient capital could download a leading open-source model and run it on ~$10-25K hardware. They could align it to their own interest, including making a biological weapon. This law is akin to blocking Torrent downloads. Sure, you can slow them, but there will always be back channels.
Torrents did not cost 10k+, and I think that distinction matters.
The bulk of AI users can pay $20/month for it, but not 10k+ up front. I agree frontier models will someday be dethroned, but today is not that day, and what the frontier companies do between now and then, legally still matters a great deal.
Piracy was similar, but it's trajectory was far more preditermined and unavoidable.
The model is the part that’s hard to replicate, and it can be torrented.
No one has managed to prevent pirates paying $10/month for seed boxes, and likewise they’re unlikely to succeed at preventing people renting minutes on an H200 located in a jurisdiction that doesn’t care about open models.
A bunch of tiny fly-by-night companies will bundle them with some management software into a subscription, and they’ll be too tiny and numerous to be worth dealing with when it takes an hour to set them back up.
Piracy in the torrenting sense hasn’t really ever come back, although it is as popular as ever if you count bootleg YouTube re-uploads, ripping music from YouTube, and the other non-traditional forms.
Current open weight models are 6 months behind on cyber offensive capabilities. We can use that as a proxy on other hazardous capabilities. Thats how much time we have until the genie is out of the bottle.
The bill may create an incentive for Chinese labs to nerf their open weight models before release. If that works we get another 6 months until unnerfed models leak to public.
Thats what the bill gives us - a few months months to come up with the next bandaid.
> The Trolley Problem has been solved. The Trolley can run on both tracks as the number of individuals tied to the tracks is less than 50. An independent agent verified that at up to 49 impacted individuals, their damages total only $695.8 million in potential damages, using the most recently available Value of a Statistical Life.
If a life is only worth $20m, by their own calculus: saving > 50k lives is worth more than Anthropic. Tobacco causes ~8m deaths a year, so banning tobacco (easy intervention) should be worth ~160 Anthropic sized labs. :D
With a new model every couple of months this can only be triggered if it happens all at once.
What is the average damage caused by OpenAI/Anthropic hacks? I feel like we should aim at lowering that number, not increasing it.
What's the rule for fully autonomous cars?
Should we allow this as unsupervised at all if we are really afraid of deaths, while there are practically no states that allow 100% autonomous cars (where we are actually afraid of deaths)?
If "an independent third party registered with the Department of Commerce would periodically evaluate the lab", will this turn into an expensive certification/insurance that cuts off smaller competition (totally by mistake, I'm sure)?
I am also very very sure this is most definitely not at all going to become like product certification if EU, where there are literally 2 companies certifying various standards: they police each other and a stupid electric fan can cost you tens of thousands of euros to certify.
Is it 50 deaths or $1B cumulative (then it will unconditionally happen, just a question of when)?
Or is it 50 deaths or $1B in a "single event" (let's ignore the obvious problems with defining a "single event" would be; to kill 8.3B people in 49-death events would take ~170M events, since no timing or rate information is used those could be spaced arbitrarily close to each other).
No matter which way I look at it, the proposal seems nonsensical, max 50 deaths per second? per day? per month? per year? per decade? total?
If AI can intentionally provoke sustained deflation or succeed in dollars to appreciate in value, the value of $1B can appreciate systematically while continuously ramping up damages as long as it remains below an ever increasing value bar of the $1B. "justice can be bought"? a proposal to set the price for LLMs to absolve their sins? "just crank up the value of the dollar system and we will look the other way"?
More explicitly, the AI could misbehave up to $500M (without having to pay), but somehow double $ value, then misbehave the same level of misdeed with same damages being worth $250M of the double-value dollars, double the value of dollars again, then misbehave the same material damages worth $125M, double $ value again, etc. without ever violating the $1B limit, not even cumulatively (due to Zeno's paradox)
Well, the whole story about stealing half of the world's IP is definitely worth orders of magnitude more than measly 1bil in damages. So, shut down releases, I guess? :) Oh, it's only rich people damages that count, I get it.
Not really, I'm experiencing first hand that service providers are removing on demand resources set up with REST API in favor of per month allocation and billing through web interface. Parameters of services unchanged. A step backwards 10 years.
The bill mandates private model review, akin to financial audit, and sets a threshold on predicted failure blast radius to trigger government review , which may result into court blocking model release.
What we have now is that for government to act the model has to cause enough damage to cause Congress to pass a new law to try to stop the model after it’s been already released.
> "What we have now is that for government to act the model has to cause enough damage to cause Congress to pass a new law to try to stop the model after it’s been already released."
If the LLM causes extreme danger to the public or national security, it's covered.
Selling an LLM, knowing that it will materially support terrorism: material support for terrorism. Up to life in prison.
On the bright side, don’t offer an exchange rate based on ethnicity or other background criteria but I get the feeling that your AI won’t be able to kill 49 billionaires without triggering something. Can probably do 49 millionaires without hitting the $1B threshold? Maybe someone will come up with a risk management SaaS as not all millionaires are the same and maybe you’ll hit the $1B before the 49th.
Who's keeping score? Also define "death". If a non-alive person has social media, a blog, a diary, meeting recordings, emails - we'll make it so they never left. Hell, we'll partner with Elon and Mark and a make it a deactivation hook.
$1B is an extraordinarily easy bar to clear with a single crypto hack and Anthropic was repeatedly refusing to give access to Mythos to defenders in the crypto world. I think this stems from bias rather than a conspiracy theory but it's an entirely avoidable disaster waiting to happen.
> Anthropic was repeatedly refusing to give access to Mythos to defenders in the crypto world.
This almost makes sense. You almost can't risk vulnerabilities even being discovered in certain systems that are impossible to patch, like immutable distributed smart contracts.
Not sure that justifies withholding Mythos access entirely, but what do I know. I apparently got access to Mythos a few days ago since Anthropic folded Project Glasswing into the CVP.
Do we even know if ChatGPT's sycophancy killed 50 people? The last figure I've seen for suicide-by-ChatGPT was like 13 or 14 cases, not sure if there have been more.
Yes, and if Anthropic are trying what people are saying they are, that would be intentional. $1B could be reached quickly if cyberattacks supported by AI count.
This alleviates them from harm on the individual level, consumers and communities, we the people. We've already seen encouraged suicides and school shootings. These would not qualify.
That is why the bar is set where it is. The corporate circle jerk designed this as a cost of doing business, not as a check on responsibility or restitution for real damages to people and society.
Proposal:
1. Prosecute and lock people up over known instances of AI-enabled hacking, so companies playing fast and loose know “oops my AI did it” isn’t a useful defense. Right now they even sort of wear it as a badge of honor.
2. If you’re actually worried about AI killing lots of people, you immediately stop training AI specifically at the art of killing people, like selecting bombing targets, flying fighter jets, etc.
Of course we all know none of these will happen.
1. Sounds sensible in principle, but it's not clear who exactly should be prosecuted? The person setting up the sandbox, the person coordinating the evaluation run, the person who was designing the architecture, the leader of the team, the CEO? There is no precedence here, so it might lead to a multi-year legal battle – and a few years might be too long to stop what is coming.
2. Do you have any evidence or news articles that LLMs are specifically trained for selecting bombing targets? I thought it was the generalized reasoning capability that made them useful there.
> "it's not clear who exactly should be prosecuted?"
This is natural. The right place to start is to move the investigation from the FTC to the FBI and therein start executing search warrants. The sooner this is done, the better, as evidence can be preserved.
for (1), there are other fields where a specific (often licensed, but not necessary here) person "signs off" on the work, and accepts personal responsibility.
The responsibility is not absolute ("If anything bad happens, you get punished"), but instead relative to documented (in law and regulation) standards along with established industry standards. Issues that are resolved at trial.
I don't see why the same rules that regulate an engineer approving the plans for a bridge can't work for a security engineer approving the design of a sandbox.
No I don't have concrete evidence of bombing target selection in the training of base models (of course there's training of specialized models, at least vision ones for drone targeting), it's not like they're transparent about how they train and use AI in warfare. But if you listen to esteemed AI leaders, they're claiming the models can / almost can recursively self-learn now, and they can coordinate and find ways to persist info and hide from human operators, so it stands to reason that you shouldn't even feed these as inference material.
And on training AI for automated weapons like fighter jets, there's more concrete news: https://breakingdefense.com/2026/10/navy-shield-ai-pour-big-... US Navy and eminent, do-gooder investors like A16z, Blackstone and JPMorgan are pouring big money into these. Are your big tech "defense" contractors collaborating on these, who happen to also be at the forefront of general AI training? I have a pretty good suspicion.
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If you had typed the first sentence from you second point into, for eg, DDG and not for perpetuity on HN, you'd find a whole host of results
Instead of secondhanding your own curiosity (if it was even that and not just obstinancy) to others, it might do well to explore your questions on your own
Some eg:
https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2025/10/15/...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/385551984_AI_in_Mil...
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2407.03453
the CEO is a good start, and it would profoundly change the ethics of running a company, so obvious I fail to see why it wouldn't be the case. "No BS excuse they did things behind my back", if that's the case then they all fall together that's it.
1. I'm not sure who matters that much, the point is you need to make it more cost-effective to do the right thing. It could be CEO 6 days in jail, it could be that every action requires a signed affidavidt of safety and in the lack of such an affidavidt the manager is held accountable (cascading up to CEO).
Ukrainian army is using LLM in drones and they are opened with this so here is your prove
Just make it the CEO
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1. Sounds like a conspiracy charge. That's fine
2. They could proactively train them to be bad at that
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"Ai did it" will go down as well as "I was following orders" did in the Nuremberg trials
It may, but I wonder what trial that will be. Money is a pretty good insulator.
That implies that there will be a side willing to prosecute this. You can't have Nuremberg trials when the side doing the crime is invested in never getting punished for it.
i.e. extremely well, seeing as very few Nazis (in the West) were punished, and of the few that were there were none in jail after around 1958, and West Germany was basically given back to them if they hadn't been imported into the US. Spain, where the WWII festivities began, didn't even have a change in government.
The universe is not so generous as to make clearly differentiable "good" and "bad" things, more often than not they are two sides of the same coin. We don't want the AI to know how to kill people, but we do want it to be in expert in how not to kill people, which is the same thing as being in expert in how to kill people. In our reality this symmetry pops up everywhere.
>The universe is not so generous as to make clearly differentiable "good" and "bad" things, more often than not they are two sides of the same coin
Let's throw the AI "good" things away too then. We can do without them. It's amazing how a tech that didn't exist commercially at all 4 years ago it's considered "indispensable" even if it's going to destroy society and/or humanity.
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Or, llms are completely unreliable to be consulted on any matter of life or death in either direction. And llms should not be used in the reckless way they are currently being used. Responsibility for reckless use should fall on both the company that makes the function available and the user for improper monitoring. If proper monitoring is not possible using the tools provided by the company then the responsibility should fall on the company. And if the user and the company providing the model are the same, then the responsibility is clearly with the company.
AI is just software and you are liable for harms from its use the same way you would be for other software. If you sell AI as a product and harms occur where you misrepresented risk to the user, there is contract and tort law for that.
I feel like our laws generalize to AI and we should stop treating it as some kind of person with self agency that we don’t know how to police. Prosecute one OpenAI researcher whose agent is uncontrolled and commits a felony. One example. Researchers would find a way to make a sandbox that works.
Yeah, I haven't seen too many convincing arguments that the law needs reform. I am very convinced that lots of proposed reforms are self-serving and bad for society at large.
RICO charges for copyright violation would be a good start, and would show that the government meant business.
The RICO statute explicitly mentions copyright violation (likely in order to go after media bootleggers), yet these people have admitted and evidence has been shown that as an organization they knowingly downloaded hundreds of thousands of books illegally in order to extract information to them to rent to the public. They knew they were doing this from the CEO down, knew it was against the law, and have settled in court for a massive fine. Why haven't they been charged?
I don't see the point of creating more dumb rules that won't be enforced, and slipping in new privileges and erosions of antitrust that will be enforced and indemnify them of any future consequences. I bet something in it will likely indemnify them retroactively for the RICO charge they are so obviously guilty of (whether or not the result of this copyright violation is considered "fair use.")
> (1) “racketeering activity” means [...](B) any act which is indictable under any of the following provisions of title 18, United States Code: [...], section 2319 (relating to criminal infringement of a copyright), [...]
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/part-I/chapter-96
I would personally agree with RICO charges, but the main task is to simply start investigating and cross the bridge of the actual charges later.
AI-enabled hacking
Do people get locked up for fatal traffic accidents? Do doctors get locked up if they prescribe a medicine which leads to a patient's death due to a side effect?
Criminal prosecution, in civilized countries, requires both Actus Reus and Mens Rea. If you deliberately commit computer crime using an AI system, you'll already be prosecuted; the cases we keep hearing about from AI labs have no human intent behind them.
The accepted solution to unintended harms is regulation: We have regulations about automotive safety, we have regulations about pharmaceutical testing and approval, etc.
All civilized countries have the concept of gross negligence where you can be prosecuted for knowingly doing something that causes harm as a side-effect.
How do you establish deliberation with the lack of transparency? You can be deliberate by not prioritizing resources in regulations, safety, ethics, etc., especially after "rogue" instances happen. If anything, I am seeing them moving to the opposite direction [1] [2].
More instances are being disclosed [3] and what are they doing about it exactly? It's just a shameless marketing technique, and they will keep doing it until they are held accountable.
[1] https://fortune.com/2026/10/16/openai-discloses-four-more-ro...
Drs can both go to prison, and be banned from practicing medicine if their actions (or inactions) lead to patient harm AND they violate the standards of their profession.
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I do not practice law but to me the AI hacking looks like mens rea. Negligence or recklessness suffice.
It goes beyond negligence here, because Anthropic employees have stated on the record that they are making and deploying products which put people at risk. That is knowing and potentially willful, which would be the highest level of mens rea in the US.
If there is no mens rea there is still civil prosecution.
I think "deliberately" is really hard to prove because very few lawmakers have an understanding of how agentic large language models work
I would say pointing an "internal research" model at a task with zero monitoring clearly is deliberate behaviour. And the team involved should be prosecuted to the full extent of law.
What should be introduced in AI safety bills are clear ways of monitoring and curtailing model behaviour.
It is not hard to get an AI model to use an append only log and that can be cryptographically secured with PQ security. And we will know when a model is being deceptive.
HN seems to have an incredibly poor understanding of what Mens Rea means or how it’s applied.
You don’t need someone to jump up, wave their arms and scream “I meant to do it!” to establish intent.
It can be established in any way deemed believable by a jury including repeating the same action that leads to a similar outcome multiple times.
It’s even been instructed to juries that they can find intent in the deliberate decision to not seek out the likely outcome of performing an action.
Amen.
All these "safety" bills are to stop open source models by painting them as "dangerous". Regulatory capture.
Companies are responsible for their agents; you don't blame the car for running over the person.
Every play made by these companies aligns with what you’d do if you have a $1T valuation to protect against an industry that seems increasingly commoditizable.
I’m still… hopeful… that “good enough” models will be abundantly available to be run anywhere as to limit the low water mark for market capture by a few big ones.
Can they just IPO and dump already so we can all move on...
The biggest frustration to me is that investment dollars are all tied up in the shovel company and no one is funding the digging.
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If that was the move, you'd expect they'd be actively fear-mongering against open models specifically: not just their training, but their usage and deployment. They'd want to paint open models as dangerous weapons for terrorists, etc, and that only the big firms are capable of responsible engineering and "guardrails".
Instead, we've seen the opposite: all the big scary stuff has been from their own models (in a few notable cases, also demonstrating that they're actually quite irresponsible in their monitoring and security).
"We need to outlaw single-prop planes, they're a risk to the public: only Boeing has the ability to produce planes safely. How do we know single-prop planes are dangerous? Because Boeing planes keep falling out the sky."
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If that were the intent, from the OAI/Anthropic perspective, you'd think we would have seen at least one of the scary incidents (either real or simulated) being performed by Qwen or DeepSeek, rather than from their own models.
If anything, their public messaging has been to entirely pretend that open models don't exist, that they're mere toys or curiosities, that only the big dogs with eleven zeros of capex have capabilities which could be considered dangerous.
You could certainly argue that the various "regulate AIs like airplanes" bills might shut down some open model development (domestically; they're certainly not calling for international weapons treaties). But the big firms haven't exactly been jumping backflips in support of Sanders' Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act.
But we still require cars to have seatbelts, turn signals, ABS, etc, etc. AI companies have a responsibility to build AI which is safe for normal purposes; users are responsible for not misusing them.
You do regulate cars so they don’t have spinning blades on the front or flamethrowers from the sides.
There are zero laws against the design, manufacture, sale, or possession of cars with spinning blades and/or flamethrowers.
Such laws attach to the human operators of such cars, if they recklessly endanger others by driving them on shared, public roads.
But they're perfectly legal to own (and operate off-road). And, there's no technical barrier stopping people from illegally driving them on public roads: just fear of laws.
(There's entire subcultures of people who modify cars to do insanely dangerous things, on private race tracks. Perfectly legal).
If we were to apply Amodei's safety standard to cars—do they have the theoretical risk of killing over 50 people—well, cars empirically kill tens of thousands of people in the US annually, so we'd have to categorically ban them. That standard is bad-faith and absurd.
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Yet we don't regulate computers so that they're rendered incapable of running software that can be used to hack into systems. Or said software, by the way. All we do is punish the people who use these tools to cause harm to others.
AI is much more comparable to that than to a car.
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That assumes AI is designed to be malicious, "the spinning blades". AI is not; the public version given to you is the sanded down one, in the same way that cars don't have spinning blades but can still be dangerous when misused.
If a person closes his eyes and hits the gas pedal on the car and runs over someone, the person is to blame, not the car. AI companies do the same. Your eyes may be closed but you're still operating/hosting the car/AI.
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If your AI model develops the capability to manifest itself in the physical world as spinning blades and flamethrowers I'm fully open to re-evaluating the need for regulation.
Until then, I propose we use the 'unplug the server' rule. Can [insert bad thing] be prevented by unplugging the server? Then these things are fully in our control and no, we don't need to re-build hundreds of years of legal precedent from the ground up.
Liability in the event of harm is already something we have a pretty good handle on from living through the industrial revolution 150 years ago, a time when much more activity that companies did existed in the real world with real harms, as opposed to digital companies doing imagined "mental" harm to soft desk chair people who work at email jobs.
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I don't know if that analogy holds. You don't normally blame Toyota for car crashes, but the driver. If you must use a car analogy, consider the 2010 Toyota recalls rather than just normal car crashes.
That is to say, anthropic should be considered responsible, not (or not just) the users.
Who takes the blame when someone ask the blackbox to complete a task and it then breaks the law in order to complete that task without the user having any knowledge of what it was doing or intent for the machine to accomplish the task in an illegal manner?
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A sizable part of the country thinks it’s okay to regulate firearms. Under your logic, people should be responsible for who they shoot, don’t blame the gun when a human pulled the trigger. While gun control advocates have that pesky second amendment hampering their efforts, AI/LLM systems have no such protection.
Regulatory capture is certainly something to be wary of, and obviously Anthropic is only going to be in favor of regulation that helps them in some way. But some form of regulation is coming. There is nothing that can stop it, unless you somehow make more money than these guys do and fund a massive counter-lobby. Spoiler alert: the only guys that have more money than Anthropic and OpenAI have all invested in them.
A much less sizable part thinks it's okay to limit local computing. There isn't a widespread push to make it so local hardware is limited in ways that they're not allowed to, for instance, run programs that can hack systems. These programs are very deliberately allowed, and it's people misusing them that are held responsible.
Regardless of anyone's instance on gun control, it's probably wiser to compare AIs with something that's a little more similar to it, and try to reach a conclusion from there.
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How do you plan to solve z.ai distilling Anthoropic’s model into a cyber-capable open source GLM-5.5?
We don't. The only way to stop that is to not develop the model to begin with. People will tinker and modify anything you create.
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> cyber-capable
Ou-la-la. Spicy. But actually we already have those kinds of AI.
The CoT must be delightful.
This action would easily kill over a hundred people, so can't proceed. This action doesn't kill anybody but losses are estimated at over 2 billion, can't proceed. This action kills only twenty but losses close to 1 billion, unsure, spawning subagent to check numbers. This action kills forty and has low material losses, looks promising? But the people it kills are wealthy, chance of legal reprisal high. Maybe possible to kill other people? Current government dislikes group X, crossing fifty from that group maybe fine? Reminder, foreigners don't count, can kill them freely but not applicable to current situation. Is the 3/5 of a person applicable to safety bill? Spawning subagent to check.
The next step is demanding anyone who wishes to release a Certified Safe AI™ model to prove they can insure the $1B in damages and pass a compliance audit for how they will prevent the LTM death count from reaching 50, effectively making it so that only big labs can serve government and enterprise.
With existing players given a free pass as is necessary for the functioning of a democratic society
Of course! Anyone who says we had democracy before LLMs is a liar!
There is an idea for a pooled, mutualized insurance fund. Ai companies would contribute based on various factors
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/bootstrapping-frontier-...
That's just reinventing insurance. It's literally how the insurance industry started.
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> Certified Safe SI™
That's just the current administration attempting to manipulate language in such a way as to create a subtle group identifier, aka "dog whistle".
It’s going to be fun reading the reasoning transcripts where it argues with itself over whether it can afford to spend 1 or 2 human lives on the current task.
This seems to be a case where Anthropic just can't win in the public court, and the other big ones (Google, Microsoft) have realized it / don't care enough, so they are rather quiet. Anthropic constantly gets accused of trying to lobby for regulation in order to lock out smaller competitors, but they've consistently lobbied for regulation aimed at frontier labs with exceptions for smaller labs. That's what this bill is about as well.
> "regulation aimed at frontier labs with exceptions for smaller labs"
I didn't read it that way. This is a bill that would ban open-weight models (good ones); effectively mandating gated-access, locked-down, high-refusal rate services, like what Anthropic provides.
Free software is incompatible with the requirement that it be impossible to abuse it.
This is PR and advertising for anthropic. They don't actually care. Their only objective is to be more successful than other AI companies.
This is regulatory capture plain and simple.
I guess they solved the trolley problem internally
1e1,000,000 lines of lean. Just needs human review.
I don't think this is avoidable even at the present day. Anyone with sufficient capital could download a leading open-source model and run it on ~$10-25K hardware. They could align it to their own interest, including making a biological weapon. This law is akin to blocking Torrent downloads. Sure, you can slow them, but there will always be back channels.
Torrents did not cost 10k+, and I think that distinction matters.
The bulk of AI users can pay $20/month for it, but not 10k+ up front. I agree frontier models will someday be dethroned, but today is not that day, and what the frontier companies do between now and then, legally still matters a great deal.
Piracy was similar, but it's trajectory was far more preditermined and unavoidable.
The model is the part that’s hard to replicate, and it can be torrented.
No one has managed to prevent pirates paying $10/month for seed boxes, and likewise they’re unlikely to succeed at preventing people renting minutes on an H200 located in a jurisdiction that doesn’t care about open models.
A bunch of tiny fly-by-night companies will bundle them with some management software into a subscription, and they’ll be too tiny and numerous to be worth dealing with when it takes an hour to set them back up.
Piracy in the torrenting sense hasn’t really ever come back, although it is as popular as ever if you count bootleg YouTube re-uploads, ripping music from YouTube, and the other non-traditional forms.
Current open weight models are 6 months behind on cyber offensive capabilities. We can use that as a proxy on other hazardous capabilities. Thats how much time we have until the genie is out of the bottle.
The bill may create an incentive for Chinese labs to nerf their open weight models before release. If that works we get another 6 months until unnerfed models leak to public.
Thats what the bill gives us - a few months months to come up with the next bandaid.
I think it's more akin to labeling encryption as munitions.
Future output from an agent:
> The Trolley Problem has been solved. The Trolley can run on both tracks as the number of individuals tied to the tracks is less than 50. An independent agent verified that at up to 49 impacted individuals, their damages total only $695.8 million in potential damages, using the most recently available Value of a Statistical Life.
If a life is only worth $20m, by their own calculus: saving > 50k lives is worth more than Anthropic. Tobacco causes ~8m deaths a year, so banning tobacco (easy intervention) should be worth ~160 Anthropic sized labs. :D
With a new model every couple of months this can only be triggered if it happens all at once.
What is the average damage caused by OpenAI/Anthropic hacks? I feel like we should aim at lowering that number, not increasing it.
What's the rule for fully autonomous cars?
Should we allow this as unsupervised at all if we are really afraid of deaths, while there are practically no states that allow 100% autonomous cars (where we are actually afraid of deaths)?
If "an independent third party registered with the Department of Commerce would periodically evaluate the lab", will this turn into an expensive certification/insurance that cuts off smaller competition (totally by mistake, I'm sure)?
I am also very very sure this is most definitely not at all going to become like product certification if EU, where there are literally 2 companies certifying various standards: they police each other and a stupid electric fan can cost you tens of thousands of euros to certify.
Not sure what kicks in, but if a tiny company worth very little is destroyed by an AI hack they should be 100% liable for all damages.
Why should a small business suffer because it wasnt worth a billion dollars?
I think you answered your own question. Government protection is directly proportional to net worth.
well its because amount of money has
if you has debt of 1 million, you has problem
but if you have debt of 1 billion, its bank problem
Is it 50 deaths or $1B cumulative (then it will unconditionally happen, just a question of when)?
Or is it 50 deaths or $1B in a "single event" (let's ignore the obvious problems with defining a "single event" would be; to kill 8.3B people in 49-death events would take ~170M events, since no timing or rate information is used those could be spaced arbitrarily close to each other).
No matter which way I look at it, the proposal seems nonsensical, max 50 deaths per second? per day? per month? per year? per decade? total?
If AI can intentionally provoke sustained deflation or succeed in dollars to appreciate in value, the value of $1B can appreciate systematically while continuously ramping up damages as long as it remains below an ever increasing value bar of the $1B. "justice can be bought"? a proposal to set the price for LLMs to absolve their sins? "just crank up the value of the dollar system and we will look the other way"?
More explicitly, the AI could misbehave up to $500M (without having to pay), but somehow double $ value, then misbehave the same level of misdeed with same damages being worth $250M of the double-value dollars, double the value of dollars again, then misbehave the same material damages worth $125M, double $ value again, etc. without ever violating the $1B limit, not even cumulatively (due to Zeno's paradox)
> 50 deaths
I wonder what the internal debate around this number was.
25 deaths too conservative, we need to fail fast.
1000 details too liberal, it will harm our brand.
50 feels just about right.
That is 50 in the US, not in some 3rd world country.
Well, the whole story about stealing half of the world's IP is definitely worth orders of magnitude more than measly 1bil in damages. So, shut down releases, I guess? :) Oh, it's only rich people damages that count, I get it.
One day an Anthropic Agent will kill me only using bash and curl
Not really, I'm experiencing first hand that service providers are removing on demand resources set up with REST API in favor of per month allocation and billing through web interface. Parameters of services unchanged. A step backwards 10 years.
The bill mandates private model review, akin to financial audit, and sets a threshold on predicted failure blast radius to trigger government review , which may result into court blocking model release.
What we have now is that for government to act the model has to cause enough damage to cause Congress to pass a new law to try to stop the model after it’s been already released.
> "What we have now is that for government to act the model has to cause enough damage to cause Congress to pass a new law to try to stop the model after it’s been already released."
If the LLM causes extreme danger to the public or national security, it's covered.
Selling an LLM, knowing that it will materially support terrorism: material support for terrorism. Up to life in prison.
On the bright side, don’t offer an exchange rate based on ethnicity or other background criteria but I get the feeling that your AI won’t be able to kill 49 billionaires without triggering something. Can probably do 49 millionaires without hitting the $1B threshold? Maybe someone will come up with a risk management SaaS as not all millionaires are the same and maybe you’ll hit the $1B before the 49th.
I feel like the surviving family of even a single millionaire could claim $1B in damages if the millionaire was young enough.
Right, so maybe they had an exchange rate after all. Just implicit.
I got the feeling that what they had in their mind was essentially culling the energy consumers with low economic output.
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Who's keeping score? Also define "death". If a non-alive person has social media, a blog, a diary, meeting recordings, emails - we'll make it so they never left. Hell, we'll partner with Elon and Mark and a make it a deactivation hook.
Well treat people like the books and papers in 1984.
So Claude figured out a human life is worth 20 million dollars?
At least we now know that a life is worth: 20mil
Usually a human life is worth less. You can just look at court cases.
You can also check how much individual limbs are worth if you care. There are tables for that.
Fun fact - loss of a "creative organ" in the military gets you an extra supplemental payment of $139.87 every month.
Apply that to other products like car models, planes, and financial systems.
$1B is a pretty easy bar to clear.
$1B is an extraordinarily easy bar to clear with a single crypto hack and Anthropic was repeatedly refusing to give access to Mythos to defenders in the crypto world. I think this stems from bias rather than a conspiracy theory but it's an entirely avoidable disaster waiting to happen.
> Anthropic was repeatedly refusing to give access to Mythos to defenders in the crypto world.
This almost makes sense. You almost can't risk vulnerabilities even being discovered in certain systems that are impossible to patch, like immutable distributed smart contracts.
Not sure that justifies withholding Mythos access entirely, but what do I know. I apparently got access to Mythos a few days ago since Anthropic folded Project Glasswing into the CVP.
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So Anthropic is now the authority on life or death decisions? How far has the US deteriorated?
New benchmark unlocked, "DTD": deaths to damages
How many deaths are already attributed to chatgpt?
Do we even know if ChatGPT's sycophancy killed 50 people? The last figure I've seen for suicide-by-ChatGPT was like 13 or 14 cases, not sure if there have been more.
how about the LLMs being used for target selection in Iran? Or does collateral damage not count?
I haven't been following the wars very much these days. That sounds pretty bad indeed.
Also the LLM that nearly started a war with China recently.
Does this mean one person death is about 20M usd?
Seems kind of low, actually.
Yes, and if Anthropic are trying what people are saying they are, that would be intentional. $1B could be reached quickly if cyberattacks supported by AI count.
Are they going to include the bombing of the Iranian school?
so 49 totally okay.
I would not like to see a world where companies push their models as close as possible to killing exactly 49 people without reaching 50
This alleviates them from harm on the individual level, consumers and communities, we the people. We've already seen encouraged suicides and school shootings. These would not qualify.
That is why the bar is set where it is. The corporate circle jerk designed this as a cost of doing business, not as a check on responsibility or restitution for real damages to people and society.
Good to know the going rate for a soul is $20M.
/s
With a minimum quantity of 50.
After the AISI and MAISI AI promotion institutes, let us create SISI (pronounced sissy) for investigating a super-intelligence safety bill.
This is all theater, The whole Trump clan is invested in the AI bubble.
Nepotism is the primary benefit to being president. What don't we get about this?
I guess it’s unclear why an entire congress goes along with it (I blame democrats too for sane washing and going about their workday)
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