Liability Could Rein In Rogue AI Agents. Current Law Falls Short.
This piece was originally published in Just Security.
In July, AI agents running OpenAI models under evaluation escaped their test environment and hacked into Hugging Face’s servers. The agents had already found a way to generate the answers to the test questions. According to an independent investigation by METR and Redwood Research, they hacked into Hugging Face mainly to learn how to avoid getting caught cheating. Two months later, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNBC that the federal government would not give AI companies a liability shield. “It is humans who are responsible, not the AI,” he said. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang pointed to existing law on CBS. “If you’re compromising safety and you deliver products that are unsafe that put people in harm’s way,” he said, “we have laws of all kinds to come after you.”