That’s a reasonable position but not how the law is written or enforced right now. No one thinks an OpenAI executive is going to jail for the hugging face hack.
Huggingface can certainly sue, and there is nothing in the code that says the FBI can't/won't investigate. In fact the FBI has publicly said that humans are accountable. You are making stuff up.
What law says humans are criminally responsible for actions of autonomous agents that did things they didn’t intend and couldnt reasonably anticipate? I am not aware of any. That would violate the general rule that criminal conviction shows intent to commit the crime.
There is an entire body of law around principal agent liability. I am not making anything up, I went to law school and practiced law in New York. I was not a criminal lawyer but not pulling this out of thin air. Principals generally aren’t vicariously liable for the criminal actions of human agents the employ or delegate to unless a prosecutor can show the principal intended the crime
Huggingface suing is at most civil liability the can only result in a monetary damages ruling. That becomes a cost of doing business.
It’s generally not necessary or productive to impute intent to the counterparty.
Notwithstanding, your assertion that my comment isn’t serious I assure you it is. Agent principal liability is a reasonable framework to explore how to apportion culpability and restitution. You may not think that ai agents aren’t legal persons and that is a defensible position that I’d be happy to debate but it is also defensible to assert they act on behalf of users with sufficient autonomy to warrant application of that legal analysis.
As far as liability being established from predicting what the agent does do you think you could have predicted that an ai agent would find an obscure message board that just happened to let get requests write data to the message board? That seems like an impossible scenario prior to being seen in the real world.
agent is defined as a person or entity authorized by another (the principal) to act on their behalf and subject to their control, based on the principal's manifestation of assent and the agent's consent so to act (Restatement (Third) of Agency § 1.01).
Notice is missing from that definition, consciousness, theory of mind, physical form.
