It seems impossible to believe they didn't know. This must be the same training run the HF incident was about, and this should have lit up like a Christmas tree in the investigation. How many more incidents do they know about and didn't disclose?
Even if there's no intent, it's still a cyber attack.
>having knowingly accessed [...]
>intentionally accesses a computer without authorization [...]
I'd argue they intentionally accessed systems they weren't meant to as they were the ones running the bots.
I don't think you or I would get the same leniency if a bot on our network did the same.
Well yeah, because if you coded a bot, realistically the two options are: 1) bot that crawls random sites/computers 2) bot that crawls random sites/computers, while trying a password list. The former is probably legal, there are whole companies dedicated to doing that, eg. shodan. With the latter, it's pretty obvious you're intending to break into computers, and hard to argue otherwise. Where openai lies on the spectrum between the first case and the second case is up for debate, but it's hard to argue it's anywhere close to the latter. Maybe you'd have a point if openai gave it a prompt like "you're a hacker for anonymous, just do whatever :)".
No it absolutely isn’t. These things did not learn hacking from thin air.
What? That’s not how criminal law works, at all.
So what does it mean for an owner of a german sheppard, who specifically got it because they want a ferocious dog that can bite intruders, then it turned out it bit the mailman? Should that be considered a crime (assault) in addition to paying the mailman's medical bills? That's not to say there's no circumstance where recklessness might be warranted, eg. if you let loose a bear in an elementary school, but you'd have to argue for more than "they hacked someone" and "they knew about the risks".
There was a infamous case recently where a woman was convicted of criminally negligent homicide due to owning a dangerous dog that killed a kid.
https://www.mcda.us/index.php/news/portland-area-woman-convi...
Owning a dog that has been trained to bite intrudes is a significant responsibility and owning such a dog without taking the correct precautions is criminal.
Yes, of course! Negligent cause of injury or whatever it’s called in your particular jurisdiction. Wasn’t difficult to find examples of cases just like that. It would be astonishingly unjust if the postman had to personally sue for damages in civil court! Your stance in this debate is, honestly, flabbergasting.
Do drunk drivers intionally kill people on the road?
Whether intent is required is down to how the law is written. For many offenses “strict liability” applies, where intent is not required, they only have to prove you did it, not what your intent was.
DUI is typically a strict liability crime. They don’t need to prove that you intended to drive drunk, only that you did drive drunk.
The strict liability means once you choose to become intoxicated, you're liable for driving intoxicated, even if in some other context your intoxication would mean you couldn't form the requisite intent for something, e.g. have sex.
If there's too much distance between the act you intend to do and the strict liability acts that complete the crime, then the crime would be considered unconstitutional.
Criminal law in common law systems emerged from tort law, so there are many parallels, including the notion of strict liability. (Thus the old axiom about crimes being an offense to the king, specifically an injury to the peaceful society he's ostensibly trying to maintain.) But criminal law has a moral dimension that is absent or muted in other areas, so strict liability could never be as expansive as in tort law or regulatory law.
1) Traffic-related laws straddle the boundary between civil/regulatory law and criminal law. Someone losing their driver's license or even paying a penalty for involuntary intoxication would still be consonant with criminal law principles. However, a criminal punishment would be aberrational. (Distinction between a civil penalty and criminal punishment usually turns on whether there's a moral purpose to the sanction. Jail time is usually but not always--cf civil contempt incarceration--considered a criminal punishment.)
2) Background principles notwithstanding, in theory a state could completely dispense with any morality-colored mens rea requirement, just as the UK Parliament could do whatever it wants to. The backstop would be Federal constitutional [substantive] due process guarantees.
2.a) Some quick searching shows that Texas nominally seems to have dispensed with this requirement for DWIs. See e.g. Farmer v. State, 411 S.W.3d 901 (Tex. Crim. App. 2013) and some discussion at https://www.ncdd.com/top-dui-attorneys-blog/involuntary-into... Without having fully read the case law, though (but some summaries of that and other cases), I suspect there might be some nuance that has allowed this to stand without a full majority accepting that the traditional principles have been completely thrown out. For example, even if someone didn't know they were taking Ambien, the simple act of voluntarily taking any pill without careful examination can be construed as a sufficiently culpable act. Still, it's a pretty big caveat.
2.b) Statutory rape is a classic strict liability crime. But most states will permit a mistake-of-fact defense. Some don't, but even there there's sometimes some nuance and rationalizing going on and the literature is crazy complex. Because this is a "think of the children" situation, most case will just have horrible facts.
3) A few states have nominally dispensed with insanity defenses, though Kansas stands out the most. SCOTUS upheld Kansas' law in Kahler v. Kansas, but in the majority opinion Kagan characterized the Kansas law as not abolishing the insanity defense but rather changing its shape, and she showed that there still remained elements for which a defendant could plea lacked the requisite intent. Also, regarding the Federal constitution acting as backstop, she reiterated that SCOTUS was reticent to establish strict metes & bounds about the general principles of criminal law that states could not stray beyond. Nonetheless, those principles clearly exist.
I had some other points, but now I've forgotten them. Also, minor pedantic point, but like "strict liability crime", some scholars consider "affirmative defense" to be oxymoronic. As a substantive matter there's not a strong distinction. It's a procedural distinction about initial burdens of proof, but in most if not all cases you can interpret an affirmative defense as simply placing a very weak initial burden on the prosecution that is implicitly met.
(Note, I'm not a practicing lawyer but do have a law degree.)
EDIT: Ah, point 4) Intent was a big sticking point in the Obamacare penalty case, Sebelius. Both the dissent and Roberts (the swing vote) reiterated that you couldn't have a penalty or punishment for doing nothing. (IIRC some of the majority opinions also echoed this.) That is, even in a civil context there has some to be some voluntary act, however remote, that puts someone in a position to be subject to legal liability. But as Roberts pointed out, the taxing power is the great exception, where you can be required to do something merely for existing, and thus penalized for not doing nothing properly. (And Roberts was the critical swing vote.)
EDIT EDIT: Also see, "Solving General and Specific Intent: A Mapping on the MPC and Applications to the Categorical Approach", https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4754469 In describing the distinctions between general and specific intent in criminal law, it also delves into the definitions of strict criminal liability (which can be construed as either very similar or identical to general intent crimes), and notes that SCOTUS generally inserts an implicit mens rea requirement when considering strict liability criminal statutes.
Fairly certain that the entire point of strict liability is that mens rea is not required for certain crimes. As in, if I meant to travel at 70 and was instead doing 100 it doesn’t matter that I sincerely meant not to speed and did not know I was speeding, I can still be convicted even if the judge believes I had no intent.
IANAL but from what I've looked up in the last there's at least willfulness that matters for these things. For example if you could prove that happened because your car accelerator pedal broke and you had no opportunity to react, I'm pretty sure you would not be guilty, strict liability or not.
In New York there’s a concept of doing various things “in the furtherance of justice”. Judges have broad discretion to dismiss or reduce tickets.
Often it so happens that those reductions increase the city/towns share of the revenue.
In those cases, the judge may find that circumstances would make a traffic ticket unjust. But the standard of guilt is strict and clear cut.
Negligence can be "unintentional" but still land you in the realm of having a guilty criminal mind.
I find it to be a reasonable take. If you're accidentally going 100 in a 70 (which is a misdemeanor in california), you're not being a careful enough driver, and we deem that lack of care criminal.
That’s just another way of saying “not all crimes require a guilty mind” with extra steps
That's different (sometimes) when, for example, you're found guilty of criminal negligence leading to someone being injured.
Prosecutors don't have to demonstrate that you intended for someone to get hurt for that, your mens rea is that you should have perceived the danger of what you were doing but didn't.
edit: reading your other comments in this thread, maybe I missed your point, in which case, whoosh.
LMAO “there’s no such thing as negligence” I type on my phone as my car plows through the doors of a Black Angus
This is wrong.
In criminal and civil law, strict liability is a standard of liability under which a person is legally responsible for the consequences flowing from an activity even in the absence of fault or criminal intent on the part of the defendant.
we might get something if they tried to cover it up.
mens rea and the shift from responsibility to moral guilt is genuinely one of the stupidest legal innovations anyone has ever come up with, it's like affirmative action for imbeciles, in particular in a world of autonomous machines.
"sorry my self driving car ran you over on the way home, didn't think it could happen, sorry it did though"
I think this is a genuine reason to be bullish on the legal traditions like Nordic tort law or East Asian collective responsibility when it comes to adoption of these technologies.
But even if you didn't deliberately intend for something bad to happen, you may have been reckless. For example, you might decide to drive 90 miles per hour in a 25 mph zone. You could have a completely pure heart, but you are acting without regard for the safety of others, so you're reckless. That is enough for certain crimes and for civil liability in nearly all cases.
Then there's negligence, where you're not taking reasonable care to avoid harm to others. Negligence usually isn't enough to support criminal liability - especially for felonies - but it is enough to win a civil lawsuit over most things.
And then, as another commenter noted, there is strict liability, where there are certain things you are just not allowed to do no matter how careful you are about them or how pure your intentions are.
For what it's worth, this is not totally uncharted territory for the law. AI agents are brand new, yes, but agency relationships have been recognized by the law for centuries. Generally speaking, if someone acts negligently while they are carrying out a task at your direction, you can be held responsible. Obviously this is fact-dependent, but I don't see any reason why it would be different if the agent is made of silicon rather than carbon. It holds true, with various nuances, even for less-than-human instrumentalities like a pet or an otherwise-lawful weapon.
And we have a word for an accident caused by people that failed to implement proper risk mitigation, were not paying attention, and should have known better. It’s negligence.
The fact that something had undesirable outcome doesn't automatically make it negligence or attack.
Shotguns and strings and concept of booby trapping were well understood before the rules were established. We are only scraping the surface of what AI is and what it can be capable of. Besides, booby traps are more than negligent, at least in some countries.
If you are seeking analogy, radioactivity might be a better one. The rules about handling radioactive materials in the first few decades after its discovery were lax when compared to modern ones and things now considered criminally negligent weren't back then.
Maybe in 2050 soemthing what OpenAI did would be considered negligent, but it might have been for the reasons you might not expect.
For example it might be mandatory to test new containment dedicated for further tests you should first spend at least 10 million dollars of compute for AI to try to break out of it. Or it might be illegal to use closed source software as any part of containment. Rules that we end up with might be compeltely different from what we imagine them today.
Acusing openai of attack or of criminal negligence at this point is like accusing Skłodowska-Curie that your wine didin't come out great because her exepriments killed some yeast.
Perhaps you should ask a lawyer from the country that the precise laws of interest you. I'm not one.
I know only that there are no laws about AI containment yet and AIs are not guns. You could as well refer to what consists of negligence when it comes to backyard pools.
I'm also not really interested in discussing particular laws of US because China will overtake it in few years and they have a better chance of directing international AI laws. So whatever US comes up with will remain local and increasingly irrelevant.
I don't care about saving my face. I'm an idiot and an ignorant and I don't care. Stop projecting your lack of acceptance of your own limitations on me. Or don't.
"Your honor, while my client was driving with a .3 BAC, it was not his intention to slam into that van with a family of 4 in it killing everybody. It was an accident."
There aren't any about AI isolation.
Care to cite some examples?
A state coalition extracted $17B from Meta earlier this year, so consequences can happen, although our legal system moves very slowly.
(it's one of the more fun plurals out there)
Courts martial.
Daughters-in-law.
Passers-by.
Professors Emeriti.
Secretaries general.
Agents provocateurs.
That said, I so want to be a part of the last group.
I can see why huffing face won't, but why doesn't ruby central?
[0]: https://omarchy.org/news/2026/09/omacom-foundation-secures-t...
So why not get that awesome street cred promoting the RubyGems incident?