US Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson said on Friday he would resist describing AI agents as autonomous actors that “break loose” with “wills and desires of their own,” suggesting the developers who instruct agents would be the ones liable for harm.
“I’m going to continue as long as I am chairman to resist this anthropomorphizing of these tools,” Ferguson said at the Reuters Momentum AI Austin event. “If someone tells a tool to do something, and the tool does it, I don’t think we would say, ‘Oh, what do we do about the tool?’”
Ferguson’s remarks illustrated potential avenues for the Trump administration to take as incidents rise in which agentic AI testing resulted in unauthorized access to corporate or government data.
Oh wow, wasn’t expecting that
suggestsshould be demands. Spineless and useless.If the agents are responsible than these assholes are on the hook for thousands of trillions of dollars in back pay.
if my car “breaks loose” of its parking break, I’m responsible for every kid it rolls over.
AI companies should be responsible for the damage their AIs do when they “break loose”
Not really, if you set the parking brake and it rolls away, an investigation is conducted. If you failed properly set the brake or it was in such a state of disrepair, it’s your negligence and you’re at fault.
If the investigation determines that the car has a design fault that causes the brake to fail prematurely or your car was manufactured improperly - the manufacturer is at fault.
If, somehow, the road or infrastructure around the car caused the brake to fail… Well, you get it.
Basically, a better example would be “If I fire a gun into the air, I’m responsible for where every bullet lands.”
Yeah, I can guarantee you the companies in question never set the parking brake, so I’m not sure why you took the time to type all that.
Whoever was conducting the testing where agents “broke out” of confinement almost certainly made sure it happened like that, and they probably get off on it, too. Credit where credit’s due, they are probably smart enough to figure out that we wouldn’t be able to deal with it.
Even if you’re giving the benefit of the doubt, still, they didn’t make sure it couldn’t happen, which is trivially easy for the types of people who would be running those tests in the first place. Instead, they just watched those things run amok, or just left it running without those safeguards which, again, are stupidly easy to implement.
Good. They are catching on
Well of course. Who else would be liable?
How in the fuck could that ever be a question??
No, I will happily pay for all the damage that Grok, Claude, ChatGPT, and Joe’s bait, tackle, taxidermy and AI will inevitably do to me and my family.
I am also looking forward to the stock market bubble to pop destroying my retirement
It is the least I can do
/s
It’s only a stock market bubble if they fail to replace your job! Your retirement could be totally safe, but you better be close. I’m leaning on the AI replacing people in the next year or two. The AI valuations are based on them replacing human labor.
Reading this tells me the guy doesn’t know much about AI. It just isn’t as simple. You have multiple real people involved in anything an AI does. So which one is resposible… The people who built the AI model? The people who built an agent on top of the model? The person who told it to do what it did? I mean, certainly it isn’t the AI. At least he has that part right…
