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.
Even better make the client liable. If grok is spewing lies that leads to damages for someone, don’t make just Elon Musk liable and XAI or whatever made it, make Twitter liable for it spewing garbage.
If a real estate agent uses AI and it messes things up for a buyer for seller make the real estate agent liable.
If people are liable for the AIs mistakes they won’t use it. If people don’t use it AI will die.
If you make the companies that made AI responsible, they will get token $1 million dollar fines after weeks in court while making $1 billion in profit and nothing will ever change.
I agree, but that you don’t seem to realize that’s precisely what he suggested is giving big “I just read the headline” energy.
The client is already liable.
Read before write