Comment by oefrha
12 hours ago
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.
It sounded like you knew for a fact that these companies were doing that and now it is clear you don't; they cannot stop something they are not doing.
I would like to see the reaction of the US government if they learned that a company was training a model to deceive and hide information from them.
2 replies →
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
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
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.
Just make it the CEO
I think leadership should be responsible too, but I don't know how you'd prevent disgruntled employees from creating these situations just to hurt execs. There needs to be some shared responsibility for all the people involved.
2 replies →
1. Sounds like a conspiracy charge. That's fine
2. They could proactively train them to be bad at that
Could they? Could you train a person to be great at math but bad at solving sudokus?
They could try to train models to pretend to be bad at that, but there are workarounds for that.
"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.
How do you do that without violence? That's like banning math. Unless you ban acquisition of compute?
5 replies →
The cat's out of the bag, there is no going back.
2 replies →
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.
Right, because there are established standards.
1 reply →
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.