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Comment by simoncion | Hacker News Reader

> Liability only kicks in after damage has been done.

a) Both OpenAI and Anthropic have done far more damage with their jaw-droppingly-sloppy testing of computer-attacking tools than Aaron Swartz did by downloading documents from JSTOR. It's good to see that you and I both agree that there are things for them to be prosecuted for.

b) Is your claim that the cost to thoroughly investigate and clean up after a cyberattack doesn't count as damage? If so, that runs contrary to every relevant claim of damages in a CFAA case that I've seen.

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No I absolutely think they should be prosecuted, and at a minimum owe damages to all of the companies that their agents hacked.

What I'm saying is that that is not sufficient to stop future harm; I expect the total damages would be less than the cost of a full training run, so it would effectively just be the cost of doing business. Liability is not sufficient to protect the world from dangerous technology - we need proactive rules around how the technology is developed, tested, monitored, and deployed, as we do with other dangerous industries such as airplanes, nuclear reactors, weapons manufacturers, etc

> Liability is not sufficient to protect the world from dangerous technology - we need [new] proactive rules...

You and I couldn't disagree more.

The major LLM manufacturers are begging for new laws and regulations so that they get a huge hand in writing them. Regulatory capture is absolutely their goal. Given that they claim to believe that they're working on WMDs [0] that they cannot adequately control, they'd just stop work if safety was their goal. Their collective cries for regulation demonstrate that they'll happily coordinate with each other if they think the issue is important enough to do so. I guess "preventing the extinction of the human race by way of weapons we built and let slip from our hands" isn't sufficiently important.

[0] See the second paragraph and associated footnote here for a justification for the use of this term: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49839682>

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