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.
I agree with you here. Playing devils advocate though, who’s responsible for cases like this:
I wonder how we might split accountability between hosting providers, inference providers, users, … based on context. This might be something that winds up being discovered through existing cases, but unfortunately the current cases aren’t really going to court much are they?
Not build, not use, but instruct. That’s a very specific word with a very specific meaning. He’s getting at intent. It’s whomever intended to take an action that led to harm without the appropriate safeguards.
A parallel might be unprepared hikers requiring a rescue. Who pays?
The nuance will be when he has to address an accident or a user who took safeguards that weren’t enough.
Look, it’s simple: The organization with the largest collection of venture-capital-funded lawyer goons isn’t accountable.
Nuance in my echo chamber nooooooooo. Yea we’re talking about a web application that is readily available and highly adopted by kids lol. A web applications thats far beyond their basic understanding, assisting them in doing things beyond there understanding. It’s a tricky liability question. Since it is a liability question the owners and distributors should be liable not their unknowing customers.
It isn’t tricky. It is always the responsibility of the company to make sure its product is safe for the users.
It’s tricky because there’s going to be a lot of novel cases to discuss, and we’re a democracy so we should probably be discussing it more. I’d still say its up for a majority of citizens to decide, but im on your side.
The user, in all of those scenarios.
If the user said “check the weather” and the agent said “got it, hacking the Pentagon” then yeah the liability would be on whoever made the agent do that.
Also if the user asked for information and the AI hacked some government agency to get it then the liability is on the LLM/ai company. It doesn’t matter if the user told it to or it did it as part of its process, the LLM/ai doing illegal things is still on the LLM/ai company.
So if I use curl to hack a government agency, is the developer of curl liable too, or is it only LLM companies that are at fault if end users decide to do something illegal using their tools?
Is curl designed to do brute force attacks to gain access and replocate other methods of hacking out of the box?
If not, then they are not comparable.
Neither is any LLM, nor any mainstream agent I know of. You CAN use them that way IF the model doesn’t trip a safety guard, but it’s gonna take a bunch of prompt engineering to get most of them to do anything illegal. I could barely get Deepseek to reverse-engineer offline software by asking for it.
Anthropic famously has a separate model for cybersecurity analysis because they won’t let you do shit on even your own infra with the publicly available Fable. You’ll have a hard time even analyzing your own source code for security vulnerabilities with Fable for that reason, though Opus might work.