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.
Reading this tells me the guy doesn’t know much about AI. It just isn’t as simple. You have multiple real people involved in anything an AI does. So which one is resposible… The people who built the AI model? The people who built an agent on top of the model? The person who told it to do what it did? I mean, certainly it isn’t the AI. At least he has that part right…
That one. There’s no question.
How about if the AI was marketed saying it specifically would not allow such things, but it did anyway. Does the company get off scott free? (Can’t say I have ever typed out “scott free”. That can’t be the real words, can it?)
Scot free. https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-2732,00.html
But the culpability still lies with whoever told it to do that. Whether the company built it to do that or not, if the user told it to “hack the Pentagon”, they are responsible. If they told it to take some action and left it unsupervised, they are still responsible for what it does.
(If they told it to do something completely innocent like report the weather, then it would not be their fault. If they told it to check the weather and left it running and unsupervised and it decided “the government has the best data on weather, I’ll just hack the Pentagon” then it would again be the fault of the user for letting it run unsupervised with no restrictions.)