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.
That’s not how any of this works.
You don’t need to be a licensed driver to buy gasoline.
If you buy a can of gasoline and set a mountain on fire, you’re still criminally liable for it.
And if you handle that gasoline in an appropriate manner and you safely store it, and it explodes on its own, then whoever manufactured that gasoline is liable for it.
I don’t really appreciate anyones analogies and they tend to be my strongest resource for learnings. The knife, the gas, gas doesnt do automated coding. We’re really past analogies here. This is an area where case law starts to shine.
And a water pipe doesn’t carry electricity, yet we use them all the time as analogies for electric wires.
If you’ve already made your mind and don’t wanna hear any counter argument, that’s not my issue. I’ll use analogies as much as I can, since they are pretty useful at showing the stupidity surrounding AI. All the hype around AI is American exceptionalism applied to a product.
No, AI is not different to any other product humanity has made. The same laws and morals apply to it. Now stop voting for an orange clown so an actual human can rule and apply the existing laws.