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.
sure it is, we shift the blame to the AI by shifting the liability to the AI companies. I think most companies are liable for their products no? I think one of the greatest mistakes we made as a society was allowing facebook to escape liability on their products, we dont have to keep making that same mistake.
Is the manufacturer of a knife liable for stabbings?
If im a gun dealer and some dude comes in foaming at the mouth saying i want to kill everyone, should i skip the red flag laws, skip the waiting period, skip the background check and hand him as much ammo as he can carry off? Would I be held liable for that??
Do we have regulations about who guns can be transferred to that invoke liability if violated???
Should gun manufacturers and dealers be responsible for mass casualty events for which they provide the guns?