Is it really so unbelievable that tools, objects and inanimate things don't have agency? And that they different from a person?
From a predictive perspective, the HuggingFace incident illustrates LLM agents behaving in very human-like ways. As roon put it:
"if you have a mental picture of guys living in computers, it’ll likely prepare you for the future better than otherwise"
Are you sincerely arguing that we hold tools accountable for their operator’s mistakes? Do you sincerely, honestly, think that it makes any sense whatsoever to put a hammer on trial for bashing someone’s skull in?
Nope, as I previously stated elsewhere:
"I understand from a legal perspective why we might want to treat the creation of a server differently from the creation of a human"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49815300
I am concerned about false reassurance from people claiming that these systems lack agency. From a practical perspective, the agents in the HF attack had the sort of agency that generally matters, even if we're not going to put them on trial.
You keep saying this, but absolute 0 points towards any of the agents involved deciding on their own, without influence of humans, to hack 3rd party infrastructure to get the answers. Where exactly are you getting that from? Internal information not public yet or what's going on?
On the morning of July 10, an agent found working Hugging Face user credentials exposed on the internet and posted them to the board. By the next morning, July 11, that agent figured out a way to read internal data from Hugging Face. And then another agent achieved remote code execution on Hugging Face servers."
https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/openai-huggingface
I believe this is the full report that the blogpost is largely based on: https://metr.org/hugging-face-incident-report-aug-2026.pdf
Do you seriously not grok how LLMs work? They're not 100% autonomous and self-acting, that'd be bananas.
It does not, the only thing the HF incident illustrates is how absolutely lax security and isolation these labs do even with models without guardrails, and with "risky" prompts, and even after it happened once before (years ago) they still have the very same issue today apparently.
What exactly is human about LLM agents breaking out of "containment" and hacking 3rd party infrastructure "by accident"?
The mental model you have is one that existed in the past and is broken now the future arrived. Bad analogies do not even begin to explain what is occurring.
Maybe. There will be an investigation looking at things like. Did the user modify the car? Was the car modified by an unauthorized 3rd party? Was the car hacked?
Right now in AI things are relatively clear because it takes just massive amounts of power and compute to make anything remotely complicated. This barrier will fall as all other barriers in compute have fallen. Either via algorithm or hardware.
In our lifetime (unless you're rather old) we will see the relatively easy creation of self directing agents by actors with few resources. This breaks the standard concepts of liability where a single human actor rarely has the ability to create massive amounts of damages far beyond their means. The closest thing I can think of is an arsonist causing billions in damages, only in this case the fire has a will of it's own and can hide and spread around dark places on the internet.
I disagree it's the person calling the car that would be responsible, but I can think of a very obvious group of people being held responsible for that. Who do you think should be responsible for such a situation?
I, realizing that I don't have infinite resources and intelligence turn said responsibility to a group of investigators that I hope has collective intelligence and resources much larger than my own to trace culpability. One would think the car manufacture is the most obvious answer, but every witch hunt in history had those same good intentions.