Unclear legal responsibility for actions taken by AI agents on behalf of users

Signals over time

2 observed signals across 1 sources, tracked for 3 days. Confidence: low.

What people are saying Observed

• “I don't know if legal "intent" is as black and white as this is making it sound: > AI companies are however claiming the undesired activity, such as hacking foreign government websites, is not part of the design, but part of the unpredictable part of the system. That tries to remove the intent which would in turn remove the criminality of the activity. In California at least, a DUI resulting in a fatality, if it is a second offense, often carries murder charges and they do convict quite frequently. The argument is the training and education you receive after the first DUI informs you enough to know the action of driving a vehicle impaired could result in serious harm to someone else, and that establishes enough intent legally for a murder charge. There are lots of areas of the law like this. It can be easily assumed that Anthropic/OpenAI et al know their technology is dangerous - they use it as a marketing angle constantly. So, if you deploy technology you know is dangerous, and it causes harm, that should be more than enough legally if not civilly. Of course this is all burying the lede a little bit, the real answer is, at least in the United States, the law”

  Hacker News · frustration

• “I know this topic and thinking will evolve. When someone hands the reins to an agent or group of agents, the agent(s) have free rein to do things, including things not directly intended by the owner. If a person has a child, and their child does something bad, there is some mixed responsibility there. It’s a spectrum from age 0 to 18, where 0 is 100% parent responsibility and 18 is 100% child’s (legal adult’s) responsibility As long as agents are unpredictable and highly capable, this will be a blurry line to draw. Human user argues to the court with prompt evidence that they never told the agent to hack that company or dump that sensitive data online. The agent “decided” those actions were in service of the prompt but here’s a plethora of perfectly suitable alternative paths it could have taken instead. If I’d paid a human to complete the task, and they broke the law in the process, the onus is on them, not me, as I didn’t instruct them directly or indirectly to perform those specific actions. It will be a murky legal mess. Though I’m sure it will provide fascinating legal arguments and judicial opinions in the decade to come. What about a company that’s got an AI workflow and the”

  Hacker News · frustration