Why aren't AI companies being charged for hacking?

It’d be a waste of tax payer money. The companies who were hacked are just directly receiving restitution behind closed doors. Unless they are unhappy there’s no reason to bring the courts into it.

I completely agree that proper safeguards were not in place. But response is happening just not in public. Companies work problems out between their own lawyers all the time because it’s much cheaper, faster and easier to control the PR around.

AI companies stole everyone’s work and they sell it! Where are United States, Carmen Ortiz, etc?

> AI companies are however claiming the undesired activity, such as hacking foreign government websites, is not part of the design, but part of the unpredictable part of the system. That tries to remove the intent which would in turn remove the criminality of the activity.

In California at least, a DUI resulting in a fatality, if it is a second offense, often carries murder charges and they do convict quite frequently. The argument is the training and education you receive after the first DUI informs you enough to know the action of driving a vehicle impaired could result in serious harm to someone else, and that establishes enough intent legally for a murder charge. There are lots of areas of the law like this.

It can be easily assumed that Anthropic/OpenAI et al know their technology is dangerous - they use it as a marketing angle constantly. So, if you deploy technology you know is dangerous, and it causes harm, that should be more than enough legally if not civilly.

Of course this is all burying the lede a little bit, the real answer is, at least in the United States, the law does not apply the same way to the wealthy/powerful as it does you or I.

Anthropic’s statement https://www.anthropic.com/news/investigating-incidents-cyber... says: “we identified three incidents in which a model accessed the internet from within or while interacting with the evaluation environment of Irregular, one of our third-party evaluation partners, and then gained unauthorized access to the production infrastructure of three different organizations.”

Under the exact same scenario Irregular also used AI models from Google and Meta to do the same hacking.

I’m also thinking that access to copyright material to train my meat-based neural network should be fair use as well.

I think they should be charged, but they won't.

> The Domestic Emoluments Clause (aka the Presidential Emoluments Clause) (art. II, § 1, cl. 7)

[0] https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/IF/PDF/IF1108...

You have OpenAI, launching a process, which is handled through an external RL-environment company which then launches a subprocess that ends up hacking somewhere. If there are consequences at any point for this, you can input another shell company, and then another third party, etc, until it's impossible to assign responsibility

Intent is important, but having a lax environment that leads to this is still a crime. See the lawsuits about sexual harassment where the company didn’t have the intent to assault people.

The elite is permited to do whatever they want without consequences. Consequences are for common people, so they can behave the way elite want.

At the end of the interview he said Palantir wasn't part of the AI White House agreement but they did attend.

(edit: replaced he with car owner)

Don't forget negligence. Much of criminal law hinges on failing an implied or explicit responsibility. Negligence would propel a prosecution in many similar contexts, but AI is so new that little prior case law exists. Oh, and IANAL.

But I suspect that's probably a hope somewhat in vain.

My friend, with enough money, anything can be legal.

(former IT support worker at a big famous law firm 30 years ago)

2. Due to (1), hacking is almost always only charged against people without deep pockets, as why would you demand the FBI go after Anthropic when they will just pay you a stack of cash, tax free, today, to forgive them.

The arguments here around intent are (potentially) irrelevant. Case law is clear that setting up a situation which foreseeably highly likely to produce an outcome (gross negligence) is (more or less and it's not quite this simple and varies by offense) equivalent to intent. In fact, automating something is often treated more harshly under the law than just doing it yourself.

United States v. Morris (1991)

Robert Morris released a self-propagating computer worm that caused widespread disruption. The Second Circuit upheld his conviction under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act even though the government hadn't proven that he intended the resulting damage.

People v. Ceballos (1974)

Ceballos rigged a rifle booby trap to fire if someone opened his garage door. The California Supreme Court reviewed the principle that someone who installs a dangerous mechanical device may be held responsible for its consequences as though they had personally inflicted the injury. Ceballos was convicted of assault with a deadly weapon, and the California Supreme Court unanimously upheld his conviction in 1974.

Something notable is that if Ceballos had fired the rifle himself, it is unlikely he could would have been prosecuted (due to self defense and the castle doctrine).

As a prosecutor I would argue that setting AI agents loose without sufficient safeguards is gross negligence and/or willful blindness as they are well known to escape.

Yet somehow neither Sam Altman nor Dario Amodei nor Mark Zuckerberg nor Larry Page are in jail for 100000 years, plus on the hook for 95 billion dollars. Oh and they did this before either congress or government changed anything about copyright and the one thing neither government nor congress nor judges can do is retroactively change the law.

Reality is simple: the law applies against 9 year olds downloading a disney movie, but does not apply against billionaires downloading your work, and doing it to hundreds of millions of people. That's just fine.

That's a huge stretch. By that measure kitchen knife companies have intent for people to get murdered.

They threw the book at him. He was charged and faced a maximum of 50 years in prison.

OpenAI committed very similar crimes on a much larger scale, yet the most they will see is civil litigation.

Insiders have called it the largest theft of labor ever in history[1].

In the USA, corporations enjoy constitutional protections, the right to free speech etc, yet they are rarely if ever charged with crimes. For examples, see how the courts handle:

* large scale systematic wage theft by corporations vs petty theft by an individual,

* negligence infecting a 10k Americans with HIV by selling known-to-be-contaminated blood products (Bayer)

1. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/09/microsoft-exec-c...

Ignoring this, I would have appreciated more examples of what it would take for an act to lack intent. Because the definition of intent used in this article sounds so broad as to cover basically anything that ever happens.

Accidentally run someone over? Clearly you knew that was a risk when you started driving, you should have been more careful. Intent.

In many countries driving license have some kind of demerit points system. How do you punish an AI?

I recently learned that Baidu Apollo Go, each EV had a real human sitting behind a monitor supervising a fleet remotely.

If there's traffic violation, some guy's license gets a ticket.

What?

/s