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FTC chair suggests AI developers should be liable for conduct of agents (www.reuters.com)
submitted 13 hours ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/52426446

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.

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[–] 19 points 11 hours ago* (1 child)
  1. Yes, they built them and knew the possible consequences.
  2. Yes, they bought tokens for them and now certainly know the potential consequences.
  3. Not if they as employees were ordered by their bosses (see 1. and 2.) to use it or face firing (unless whistleblower protections become an actual thing again, which they aren't these days -- then employees woudl be expected to blow the whistle).
  4. Yes, if we can find out who they were.
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  • [–] 7 points 9 hours ago*

    Same as with any tool. If your boss orders you to use some power tool and this causes and injury or death then your boss should be held responsible, if you decided to do it on your own, then you should be held responsible, if it turns out the tool had a critical manufacturing defect which caused this incident, then sometimes the manufacturer needs to be held responsible. Not really a new concept.

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