- cross-posted to:
- fuck_ai
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- fuck_ai
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
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.
Honestly, I have thought long and hard about how to handle the situation where a company commits crimes as a result of their decisions and how to remove the concept of the corporate veil in a way that provides just protections.
Essentially there would need to be an affirmative defense wherein the board and executives must admit to the wrongdoing, but prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the actions were taken by employees with malicious intent against the corporate leadership, either as a whole or against a subset. This means it cannot be weaponized to take out a boss you don’t like, but also it makes it very hard to get out of someone being held criminally liable.