People are not charged with hacking when their unsecured box is taken over by a botnet and does bad stuff.
The broad concept has been well-known for half a century at least, and the very specific concept for several years at least. It’s clear that they didn’t take reasonable precautions against it. And it’s not even the first time this sort of thing has happened, though it’s higher-profile and -impact than before.
And yes this is absolutely the first time autonomous software has breached containment. What are you referring to? Perhaps just corporate cyber in general?
Because the AI itself is not a legal person, it must be OpenAI that's responsible for what it does.
For non-fiction you could look at Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014).
More recently, see Cade Metz’s NYT profile of Geoffrey Hinton, “The Godfather of A.I. Leaves Google and Warns of Danger Ahead” (May 1, 2023).
Maybe (and historically, not with CFAA) - but they're still going to extradite you to a trial here to find out which is more than enough to ruin your life. The government is already looking for a great excuse to criminalize open source models.
Sounds interesting+scary. Do you have some source for this ?
Because if you mean the Government, I think they frankly just care whoever is paying them to make an executive order or worse a law paid by corporations to not only block, but ideally also ANHILIATE ANY POTENTIAL COMPETITION.
It's the ultimatum against the small guys. Sold as "Anti-China", when in reality it's only purpose is total dependency to corporations by law.
Do you guys really not comprehend the impact of giving every script kiddie an Astra-equivalent model to play with, this time without any guardrails whatsoever?
Cause I'm starting to think you aren't really thinking through the impact of power plants, hospitals, etc all being hacked en masse. People will die.
Or making it easy for anyone to make a virus (it's not hard, mechanically). Even more people will die.
Taking this to the extreme: You don't just give every kid a "do anything" super intelligent button. Open source models have a limited lifespan whether you like it or not, for the safety of all of us as a whole.
I don't think you understand how bad it will be if anyone has a button that can hack anything, our infrastructure is not ready for this. Actual people will die. Do you just not get this?
Bioweapons as well. Do you not understand how easy it is to craft a virus at home? You can literally order everything you need online. Again, actual people will die.
You are arguing the equivalent of letting everyone own missile launchers or RPGs because "open source good."
It turns out you can give defenders the opportunity to front-run, at least on the most critical and widely used infrastructure.
Same with bio risks.
That you don't have access to (C) to harden your blog is a non-issue from a societal perspective, hardening the software that our infrastructure relies on first is simply more important.
Whoever wants to have access to (A) will have it, but letting only few select corporations provide (C) will mean majority will be priced out of (C).
Are you a shill or something?
Other sites beckon.
After all, who cares if abliterated extremely intelligent OSS models result in actual innocent people dying? That's <insert group here> problem. We need to be able to generate our uncensored furry fanfics, goddamnit!
OSS models can help to fix infra especially for folks who would never do it themselves. We do not know yet what final effect would be and it doesn't seem sky is falling now or in near future.
"people dying and furry fanfics" is a scarecrow and distractor respectively, it would be awesome if more specific examples would be used in place.
State actors do but they are not unhinged enough to use this to cause massive loss of life, unlike random crazy people with access to a computer.
Professional criminals don't have access. Please explain exactly how you expect a professional criminal to get access to a non-safety-tuned Astra/Fable equivalent.
> OSS models can help to fix infra
You can work with the vendors of critical software to fix infra first, without giving every random crazy person access to something that creates cyber/bioweapons.
> "people dying and furry fanfics" is a scarecrow
You don't think people will die if OSS models make it easy to create a bioweapon, or make it easy to hack hospitals, infrastructure, and the like? Please explain your thinking.
It's very easy to order all of the raw material needed to create a virus, the challenge is in making a viable one. But models make this easy.
Same for cyber. Hospitals, emergency services, and infrastructure like power plants are not sufficiently hardened to withstand an attack from Fable-class models.
On bio: while it's easy to order all the raw material, there's the whole process of culturing bacteria/viruses/etc. that isn't trivial, and while a LLM might help in explaining stuff for rookies, there needs to be somebody physically working on it. It's not automatic. Once you get to this level, you'll find that any undergrad biologist or chemist can already make bio/chem weapons, and you don't see it happening. Terrorist groups already employ biologists or chemists that are supporters of their cause, no need for LLMs.
On cyber: aside of the question of why critical infrastructure is on the Internet on the first place (ah yes, lowest bidders, people not caring enough, business not giving IT/OT budget, S in IoT standing for security etc), if the available models can't handle cyber tasks, how can you defend yourself? See the HF "attack" that HF had to use GLM-5.2 to investigate what happened. This is the best argument for open models. Unless of course, you are the AI model creator or somebody they authorized to use their sanctioned model/harness and want to create a moat for their business.
This is FUD. Creation of business moats by fear.
However, I’d feel better about ceding control of AI to the government if they didn’t seem so intent on building an apparatus for surveillance/control.
Your “furry fanfic” is a somewhat pathetic scarecrow; this is a complicated topic.
Your use of the internet may lead you to greatly overestimate the number of people who take what they read online as real. More people than you think treat this shit, regardless of the website/forum, like Jerry Springer and Satuday Night Live; just entertainment.
The STEM crowd often overthinks the impact of violating their pet theory.
Can an LLM escape its computer entirely and stomp through a city center like a kaiju? Settle down.
You're veering towards thought policing over speculation.
Who will decide how to use the power of ai...you?
it is no surprise that the companies and safety institutes who believe that they alone may 'tame' the fire, are the cause of safety incidents. a safety test caused the explosion at chernobyl.
anthropic and openai are the danger to society.
they are the ones making the dangerous models. they are the ones using tens of millions USD of inference, and thousands of agents, to hack computer systems.
i have trained zero dangerous models. i own zero servers that i use to run hacking agents. i could run one hacking agent with my single subscription.
there are some arrogant researchers remaining at anthropic who believe that they do care about safety. those who cared about safety at openai have left.
depending on how it goes, we might need some kind of earlier intervention by the US government to take control away from the current leadership of the ai companies and prevent further incidents.
Just because you don't do a bad thing doesn't mean other people won't. It's why you don't give everyone an RPG launcher.
"Trust us, we're here to protect you." Sure we are. /s
It's only a matter of time before open-source gets banned in the US under that same paternalistic security blanket. /s
Robert Morris very intentionally wrote a computer virus, released it into the wild to infect computers he didn't have permission to use, and tried to cover his tracks by making it look like it came from MIT instead of Cornell. The only accidental part was that the virus was too successful, and that he got caught.
Lori Drew intentionally violated MySpace's TOS (in the course of cyberbullying a child until she killed herself), and was acquitted because TOS violations don't rise to the level of a crime.
People don't drink and drive with the intention to kill people. They drink because it's fun and then get behind the wheel because it's easy and convenient, even though they know the dangers they convince themselves nothing that bad will happen.
AI companies are creating these dangerous, powerful models (that they keep telling us are dangerous and powerful), then they take off all the safety guards to run them in woefully inadequate "sandboxes". Pure negligence.
So, no, this is not at all analogous to a totally routine question of whether someone was negligent in how they deployed some software.
Section 1030(a)(5)(A), covers anyone who
(5) intentionally accesses a Federal interest computer without authorization, and by means of one or more instances of such conduct alters, damages, or destroys information in any such Federal interest computer, or prevents authorized use of any such computer or information, and thereby
(A) causes loss to one or more others of a value aggregating $1,000 or more during any one year period; ... [emphasis added].
The District Court concluded that the intent requirement applied only to the accessing and not to the resulting damage. Judge Munson found recourse to legislative history unnecessary because he considered the statute clear and unambiguous. However, the Court observed that the legislative history supported its reading of section 1030(a)(5)(A).
I'm not sure how you could categorize the Morris Worm as lacking mens rea based on that statute..
https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=551386241451639...
What the Frontier labs have done is not this, however. Also, they know damn well what can happen and they still don't take the appropriate precautions. At this point it's very hard to believe it's not intentional for purposes of marketing.
US law doesn't really give much of a crap about your intentions unless you can back it up with a wall of money to exclude yourself from the rules of the general population.
ie, I intended to steal money from you. Under common law stealing is "taking with intent to deprive". How thats determined is a bit harder.
But how can someone be "grossly negligent" if they didn't intend to cause an accident? well they either allowed a situation to happen, or didn't stop a situation happening that they could see was bad.
An example of this would be the igintion switch from GM that caused all those deaths. the engineer saw that it was shit, knew it didn't do what it was supposed to do, and half arsed the replacement to the point where it wasn't actually changed.
"We are going to test the cyber capabilities of this new model. Yeah it should be fine to have a package proxy. Hmm? whats that? isn't that a security issue? naaaa those proxies are secure."
If you run someone over on purpose you get convicted of murder. If You do it by driving recklessly you get convicted of culpable homicide.
The only time you get off with nothing is if it is determined to be an accident.
As they always say: ignorance of the law is no excuse. Running a dangerous machine prevents you from claiming you had no idea the machine was dangerous.
They hacked a competition company. The intention was implicit when there is economic gain to be had.
> People are not charged with hacking when their unsecured box is taken over by a botnet and does bad stuff.
Because it is a lose for that people. If the botnet left money in their pockets the situation would be totally different as there will be an incentive for them to let the botnet hack them.
Not how it works. Intent requires at least that you were deliberately doing the criminal act (sometimes also that you knew it was criminal, or at least that you had some reason to believe that it was wrong).
So, they did something that benefits them by mistake. I would like to see a person would be judged in that situation. I can imagine that the bar to put someone in prison is way lower than to give a fine to a mega-corporation.
Here's one case: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/342/246/ where someone who took some metal they believed to be abandoned was aquitted on that basis, though this particular case made it to the supreme court because the lower courts tried to rule that the fact that he didn't intend to steal them didn't matter.
Also, I don't think there's a strong argument that hacking huggingface did benefit them. If you could prove it was a deliberate ploy to market their models, then perhaps you could argue they expected to benefit. Otherwise, you could argue that it's negatively affected their reputation.