No company is above the law.
OpenAI should be accountable for any laws their agents break
OpenAI should be accountable for any laws their agents break
One would disincentivise providing capable AI models that can be used for cyber security research. The other would disincentivise criminals from commiting crimes.
[edit] - I realise now that this could actually be a case of OpenAI running those agents themselves, rather than someone using OpenAI's models? Could OpenAI be that careless?
Where have you been?
But in other cases, shouldn't it be both? OpenAI is ultimately the one executing the model calls. It's not like they send you a hard drive or standalone box and then you use it how you want. It's all (intentionally) centralized to them, in a way that's core to their business model.
If they knowingly allowed use of their services for illegal purposes then yes, but in so far that they provide a service that can be used for useful things (including cyber security research) and did a best effort attempt at abuse, I don't see why it should make sense to hold them liable. This is especially the case now that frontier LLMs are almost a commodity that can be used without restrictions from providers outside of your legal jurisdiction.
Now the reality, the openai engineers trained a model, executed it, and under their supervision (no users were involved) it committed so many felonies that we are learning about a new one every week. What would be a just punishment for OpenAI?
I realise that in this case it was OpenAI being responsible for their agents running wild, and they should know that that is to be expected and should have saveguards in place. If they can be shown to be negligent then the punishment can probably be expected to be a lot more severe than if it was an accident. I make no judgements as to what this particular instance is, but I do believe that OpenAI has a far more greater responsibility for its agents running wild than someone running a home lab.