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.
I disagree that the committer bears any responsibility, as it’s the operator who asks a running agent to break laws.
The committer and operator could very well 2 different people, but strongly agree with the rest of your sentiments.
Eh… I mean, you could have your LLM generate a patch that I commit. Obviously, lines get blurred here, but the fact that I am accepting your patch or, in most cases, a pull request: I am also, to some degree, responsible.
That’s why we have reviews and approvals.
If you’re submitting the code to me in a pull request: that is you taking ownership of, and responsibility for that code; unless you explicitly state otherwise. When I accept it, likewise, I’m stamping my name on it and saying “I approve of this.” It’s no different to an engineer signing off on an architect’s plans.
“my friend made a feature and I’d like to contribute it.” even then, even if you’re not the author: you’re presenting it and are attached. If your code contains a known vulnerability, I might think you’re trying to sneak into the project and I’m going to blame you by default: I don’t care if your friend wrote it, I don’t care if an LLM wrote it; you’re the one who submitted the PR to me, and its contents reflect on you. If I approve a malicious PR, I’m also responsible; it may have been a mistake. It may have been an accident. I may have just been tired and not read closely… Doesn’t matter, I’m responsible because that’s how actions work.
In terms of explicitly asking an agent to break laws, that’s a little different of course, and not so much applicable to the “committer” scenario.
I see your point, and even if you accept malicious code, you still shouldn’t be liable IMHO. You at that point haven’t created any wrong doing in the timeline thus far.
It’s only until someone operationalizes and boots that code into function that damages can be created, no?
Not necessarily. The XZ vulnerability had no evidence of being used in the wild, and there were no damages. But it was still malicious code that was being put into a project and very well could have resulted in such damages. Attempted murder is still a crime.
In the case of accepting malicious code, if it’s intentional, then yes, absolutely. If it was an accident, well, it’s still on you. You’re a victim, just like the XZ maintainer was, but it’s also your responsibility to clean up the mess.