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.
Yeah, I can guarantee you the companies in question never set the parking brake, so I’m not sure why you took the time to type all that.
Whoever was conducting the testing where agents “broke out” of confinement almost certainly made sure it happened like that, and they probably get off on it, too. Credit where credit’s due, they are probably smart enough to figure out that we wouldn’t be able to deal with it.
Even if you’re giving the benefit of the doubt, still, they didn’t make sure it couldn’t happen, which is trivially easy for the types of people who would be running those tests in the first place. Instead, they just watched those things run amok, or just left it running without those safeguards which, again, are stupidly easy to implement.