Is A.I. Above the Law?
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Technically, the code is owned and deployed by AI companies which make the AI companies 100% responsible. I'm not sure how is code written by LLMs different than any other kind of code. If somebody hacked just like OpenAI's agents did, he would've ended up in prison right away.
It's if nothing else a staple in the Arthur Conan Doyle tradition of mystery novels, and even then half the plots involved hiding who was culpable by using the machinations to create false alibis, with delayed murders and the illusion of a locked room as not even in the 19th century did anyone believe that the indirection itself would hold up as a defense.
If someone buries an anti-personnel mine in a public park and then argues that it acted on its own accord when it maimed a pedestrian, I doubt you'll find a court on the planet that would spend even a 4 seconds considering the culpability of the land mine itself.
You may have a case that the magic inference juice was somehow tainted, but that seems like a stretch. If you run your car into someone else, and it isn't a total failure of the systems of the car, you did that, not the car, and not the car company.
One, all major governments that have an AI presence in their borders have accepted that there is a high enough probability of a runaway self-improving AI advancement that will result in whoever owns it winning everything forever that they will do nothing to slow the development of the AI within their borders. In fact quite the contrary. Remember, they don't have to believe this is the only possible outcome, only that it is likely enough and catastrophic enough if someone else gets it first. And remember, they don't have to be right, either. It only has to be what they believe.
Secondly, the entire US economy is clearly tied up in AI. By extension, basically the entire world economy is too. The US is not the world economy anymore, but it's still a big enough fraction of it that if it goes down, everyone is going to go down. Every major government, in its own different way, needs the economy to stay up so the populace doesn't get antsy and so they continue to have money to spend. So, again, number must go up and if that means writing a blank check to the AI companies to break the law, so be it.
The good news is, barring the worst-case singularity outcome where the law doesn't matter anyhow, is that this won't go on forever. But I can't predict the exact time or way it'll cease being true.
That said, I'm very concerned about AI as such a tool. I used to work in RL and it seems crazy to me, the extent that the guardrails are dependent on RL working as planned. I don't personally believe that the tech is ready for what will be (and is) encountered in a dynamic unpredictable real world environment. What I've read from the HuggingFace 'transcripts' only amplifies my concern.
The company is obviously responsible for what their systems are doing
And of course all the ai companies are incentivized to do this. Their whole valuation depends on them being able to say their tools do this, can reduce labor and save money. If they aren't reducing labor, then that's terrible as these subscriptions are not insignificant amounts of money. It becomes less of a tool that can save money and more an actual new cost center that you really are just paying to appear to be keeping up with the joneses.
I wouldn't have trusted one of those agents to run without me watching the session log, let alone thousands.
We already have laws for this. If I misconfigured a pentesting tool and it breached an unauthorized target I'm liable. Why is this different?
Say I use the summon feature on my Tesla and it runs someone over, am I at fault? You could argue it's not my fault, but I'm definitely getting sued. Is Tesla at fault? Probably but again it's not crystal clear, they could argue it's not their fault (misuse of feature, etc), but either way they're also getting sued.
If Tesla is developing a summon feature and then runs someone over during testing, are they at fault? It would be hard to argue otherwise!
More than one party can be held responsible for an injury. Jurors deal with this all the time.
I thought you were playing it up but yeah the "financial market" can be "hacked" by "rogue ai agents" just like how HuggingFace was (even though the breach was itself controlled pretty quickly).
It's not just obvious who's responsible, it's obvious who benefits from pedaling the "rogue AI" narrative.
Under what law specifically?
Just because you believe they should be held responsible doesn't mean the current law is written that way. CFAA charges require the defendant "acted knowingly or intentionally", you think openai intentionally acted to hack those sites? Would "they should have pretty much expected that output" stand up in court for criminal charges?
OpenAIs models since 5.5 were troublesome in ways even a layman like me could reproduce, their testing environments (“sandbox”) downright a showcase of what not to do and they, despite being one of the biggest labs, didn’t observe what any of their models output for weeks after multiple prior incidents. They had multiple warnings, they took not a single precaution.
You operate machinery or software, you are responsible to monitor it.
So yes, they knew, without a doubt, that this could happen again.
What OpenAI does is like the Ford Pinto (partly because their recent models are inherently faulty [0], not just their use of them) and the responsibility is solely with them.
https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/09/14/ex-ftc-boss...
This is blatantly false. If you actually read more than just headlines about the HuggingFace incident (read https://metr.org/blog/2026-08-26-openai-hugging-face-inciden...) you'd find extremely surprising (including offensive) behaviors in the agent logs. One of the investigators released even a series of interviews due to how novel the incident was.
AI is not "standard software", as it doesn't work according to a fixed set of rules, and this is the core problem.
According to the definition of "rogue":
> Rogue is a noun and adjective meaning [...] an independent entity operating in a dangerous, uncontrolled way
the agents involved fit it literally.
dns resolver fail?
> It's not AI that's ignoring the law! It's the OAI that's breaking IT!
> I hope every single journalist who tries to pin responsibility on an LLM gets 100 days of continuous painful diarrhea.
If you or your software hacks a website, the law will hit you hard. But powerful AI companies have the money and influence to avoid the same consequences.
The US administration just needs to enforce existing laws equally. Do that, and AI companies will suddenly have a very strong incentive to take safety seriously.
What absolute drivel.
Traffic lights? Elevators? ABS brakes? Sprinkler systems? Circuit breakers? HFT?
How about a pacemaker?
We have lots and lots of autonomous systems in the wild with very well-understood definitions for who is at fault when something bad happens.
We are totally in the "railroads" phase of AI industrialization. Waiting for the next Teddy Roosevelt to come along and trust bust before it's too late.
Like a Tesla in FSD mode, the driver is and should always be held responsible for the car's actions.
The companies the push code that breaks the law should, as well, always be held responsible.
This really isn't that hard we just have to wade through all the pollyannas that make this challenging.
I thought they reached the internet before they were able to use the message boards et al.
Is that the case and is this quote misleading by swapping the order of events?
GPT-6.0-Med LLC, Luna GmbH etc.
Regulations will come but this promotes anti-legal premise of "innocent until proven guilty".
Download a book and you are a thief
Download 1 million books and you are OpenAI
Or another beautiful recent example:
"Adult Film Producer Unmasks Prolific ‘John Doe’ Torrent Pirate as Meta Executive" https://torrentfreak.com/adult-film-producer-unmasks-prolifi...
>Last summer, the company took aim at a much larger target. Together with Counterlife Media, Strike 3 sued Meta, accusing the tech giant of downloading thousands of its films via BitTorrent to train AI models. With 2,973 films at stake, the case could be worth up to $446 million.
>According to a motion filed last week, an anonymous pirate behind a residential AT&T connection is an executive at Meta’s Reality Labs division, which develops the Quest VR headsets.
>After AT&T shared the information, Strike 3 says its investigation revealed that the subscriber is an executive in Meta’s Reality Labs division. Citing his LinkedIn profile, the company notes that he has worked at Facebook and Meta for more than a decade.