“Who bears legal responsibility when an agent blows past its guardrails and causes real-world harm?”
That is very easy to answer - the person being responsible for what is running on that hardware when it’s personal hardware, and in corporate environments the manager who is responsible for deploying the agent and the engineers who didn’t ensure this doesn’t happen if they failed in their responsibilities by not monitoring the system (dependent on if the manager even allowed suffcient ressources for monitoring, if not, they should also not share the blame)
AI is a tool
Similarly you can’t blame a hammer for causing harm, you blame the individual who holds it.
AI is closer to owning a pet.
If your dog escapes the back yard and kills a child, you dont blame the dog.
You blame the owner who created a poor containment and for giving the dog the right incentives that led to the death
I like your analogy and think it fits better for sure.
If you crush someone’s skull with a hammer, you are responsible, not the person who made the hammer. But what if you crush someone’s skull with a hammer that was sold to you as a head massager?
In this case open AI was the one wielding the hammer (the AI) though, idk what your argument even is.
Therefore, you blame the person wielding the hammer.
Yup that’s what I was getting at, but I like the pet analogy better that another commenter brought up.
Sort of. With something as simple as a hammer sure, but when the hammer is equipped with a 9mm pistol then it falls under different safety standards that deem the tool inherently unsafe. A physical tool would be recalled if somebody got hurt in an unintended way.
So this company is suing based on a CA state law arguing unfair competition. To me, this case seems weak and if it does have merit in California it certainly won’t in federal courts. Actual complaint rather than the ai summary pretending to be a news article
We’re about to find out how much OpenAI is willing to pay to avoid discovery.
We’re about to see Sam Altman in a Nazi uniform. 😆
They’re already due to run out of money mid 2027. And sizing up their user base only increases their expenditure. They have zero path to profitability.
This being a public interest group, they might not even take the bribe
Sadly, the first and foremost goal of every institution is to preserve itself.
The organization sued under California’s Unfair Competition Law, arguing OpenAI’s “unlawful and unfair business practices” diverted work and resources to responding to the Hugging Face incident.
This ain’t going anywhere. Hugging Face already had a large chunk of OpenAi money to keep quiet about the incident. No doubt they’ve waived their rights for future litigation too. A bunch of public interest lawyers in the US isn’t going to help. The government won’t allow it.
