lawyers are helpless babies when an entirely first year legal question is wrapped up in...."technology". unfortunately

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

Bringing charges is at the discretion of the prosecutor, and the CEOs of these companies are dining with the president. Learn a little bit about how power works.

> Consequences so far: none.

What?

They're US companies and I've heard that it requires intent according to US penal law. I find the article's claim that intent is established dubious. Since this is hard to prove without a whistleblower, it seems that they only have to fear civil lawsuits, and given that we speak of trillion+ USD companies they might feel confident to be able to fend these off or simply pay out the victims in settlements.

> If we can show that the design would foreseeably lead to the questionable activity, then we have shown that was the intent of its creators.

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

I doubt this will catch on outside of luddite/cynical circles unless one of these attacks does some actual damage.

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.

How many of the victim companies have filed complaints with the FBI? As I understand it, that would be step one.

Because the president is heavily invested in them.

I wonder what the statute of limitations is.

If I tell an agent to trade stocks and maximize profits but the agent decides to hack something to achieve that am I on the hook for hacking? Genuine question

No one with real money or power wants to cross OpenAI or Anthropic just yet. It's a closed ecosystem. OpenAI hacks HuggingFace, Nvidia soon after buys HuggingFace while it also before backed OpenAI. In the end, they just handle it all behind closed doors like family business.

Is it because nobody knows "how" to actually do it?

The real answer is that crime generally requires mens rea. At some point, however, letting your AI break into other systems will be conventionally understood as an act of negligence, and it will get prosecuted accordingly. We're not at that point yet.

I'd be keen to see if there were any single user "experiments" that morphed into a hacking incident, and if so, was the person responsible with with unauthorized access charges. If so, then it will be yet another example of might makes right.

I understand that people are upset by this, and I would be too, but if companies just built secure systems hacking couldn't be possible. And I'm not victim blaming, just pointing out the obvious.

In case you were wondering why Anthropic last week banned "verbally abusive" language towards its agents: this is 100 percent why. Because if they get you to believe - even a little bit - that their platform is "sentient" it means _they_ aren't as liable for criminal consequences.

AI offers an attractive "diffusion of responsibility" to operators allowing them to point to AI as the culprit of the heinous acts not the people who profit from the AI, incidentally.

For the same reasons they aren't being charged for massive theft.

I had a similar question regarding driver-less EVs.

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.

1. While a crime, hacking isn't going to be charged unless the entity being hacked wants there to be charges, as a conviction will heavily depend on participation by that entity.

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.

The real answer is that except in the case of OpenAI, the AI companies aren’t actually themselves doing the hacking. It’s a company called Irregular that did the hacking. The company used AI models to do it; it told AI models it was a CTF exercise in a controlled environment but it was actually the real Internet. If AI companies can be charged for hacking, then all gun manufacturers can be charged for all homicides carried out through their guns. It’s a basic user/manufacturer distinction that the press is willfully ignoring.

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.

National security issues. That's the core of why. Any hot water these AI companies will get into will be bailed out by the USA. The Arm's race has switched from Nukes, to AI and drones.

Are any victims calling for prosecution?

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.

The argument laid out in this post very definitely is not how "intent" works in US criminal law. Under CFAA, they had to have wanted to break into the systems that were attacked; it is not enough to demonstrate that they built a system recklessly.

Because government and corporate interest have merged at this point.

I think these companies very much want to assign responsibility to an entity we can't meaningfully jail or fine. I think it may sometimes make sense to claim model provider negligence instead of operator responsibility, and user intent can likely be easily ascertained by reading the conversation logs. In a case where a company used its own model, responsibility is obviously and unambiguously within the company, of course.

The juridical process is not caught up with this technology yet.

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

Same reason nobody was prosecuted for the murder of Suchir Balaji. Whole system is corrupt. Progress in AI is considered more important than both the law and human life.

same story with IP theft, why is it ok for them to train on published author works? the answer is: there's money and wealth in play that is fine with it.

> ... It’s a position tailored to dissuade prosecution as it removes intent, which is typically required for a crime.

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.

The more important question is the government went after Aaron Schwartz, United States v. Aaron Swartz after JSTOR settled with him.

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

If I took Metasploit and hooked it to a Cron job then used it to hack HuggingFace they would lock me away for life and the Justice Department wouldn't care that I use software to automate it. No idea why these companies get away with what is essentially the same thing.

Don't you all understand that existing laws on the books are already adequate for dealing with the threat posed by AI

/s