Afaik anyone can buy a bulldozer. Whether or not you are licensed to operate it is a different story, but there's nothing stopping you short of your conscience.
Licensed or not, you're fully liable for any damage you do with it. And possibly go to prison. I'd like to see crime committed by AI held to the same standards as crimes committed with any other tool.
I don't think the law makes a distinction over what tool you use to commit a crime.
The problem with AI is that the AI might do something that would constitute a crime (eg. attempting to land malicious code via a PR), but the general legal standard to convict a person of a crime is malicious intent (or sometimes negligence).
If the human user instructs the AI to do X and the AI does X by committing crimes in the process, the prosecution usually has to prove the human intended this to happen (or is somehow criminally negligent). For traditional tools, the user has much greater control over the tool so the intention can be more easily deduced from the results. For AI, at least for now, results can be wild. I don't think the legal system is prepared to put people in prison because their AI randomly ran amok after being given an innocuous prompt. This is analogous to holding a driver criminally liable for harming people due to a serious malfunction of the vehicle.
If anything, I think more liability should be imposed on AI developers.
I'd assume that after some number of news stories about AI agents committing crimes, the threshold for criminal negligence should be easy to reach for anyone who doesn't take proper precautions
A lot of negligence is of the "the last 30 times nothing went wrong" type, and the dangers are increasingly well known
I generally agree. But the field is evolving too fast for the legal system.
I'd imagine regulation and enforcement will come when things are starting to settle down.
The analogies with vehicles being inherently dangerous and require extra regulation are apt, because safety measures (eg. speed limits, seat belts, comprehensive road safety rules etc.) were implemented bit by bit, but way after the cars had been invented...
