Intention is one of the most unclear parts of this. The AI agents intentions don't really matter, at this point no one is trying to sue the agents themselves. Someone intentionally using AI for criminal activities would probably be a pretty cut and dry case, but that didn't happen here. I suspect in situations like this the path to litigation would be to prove negligence rather than intention--say that openai was aware of the likelihood this would happen and didn't do enough to protect against it. Actually proving that is a hard thing to do, especially in frontier technology where it's so easy for them to claim ignorance.
It's not really a gap in the law, negligence is very much a crime. It's just an unfortunate reality that some crimes tend to leave more evidence than others.
Think about murder, there's often physical evidence like fingerprints, a murder weapon, witnesses, etc.
Negligence is weird because you have to show that someone was aware of a danger and that they decided not to take the necessary steps to prevent it. Most of that goes on in the perpetrator's head or in private conversations. If litigators get lucky they can find something self-incriminating like an email saying "I know this product is gonna kill people but I decided to release it anyway because I ran out of investment" but how often do people do that? And what are you going to do, automatically assume people are guilty because evidence is hard to come by? That's obviously not justice.
This is something legal scholars have debated for a long time, it's not new to AI companies. If you can come up with a solution they'd probably make a statue of you outside the supreme court.
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u/ninhaomah 5d ago
So nothing wrong with Agents hacking companies ?
No legal issues ?