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 seriously doubt any of these agents are actually hacking websites from a “I need XYZ information” prompt. Claude triggered the ol’ “need to downgrade to Opus for safety” on me when I wasn’t even asking it to investigate anything security related, just help track down a few bugs.
The whole “our agent went rogue” thing is almost certainly marketing. They WANT you to think it’s dangerous, they’ve been saying it since like GPT 2 which couldn’t produce a paragraph of coherent text. They WANT to be regulated because that makes it harder for smaller players to compete. Because right now z.ai’s GLM 5.3 Flash is about as good as Claude was a few months ago and it costs pennies in comparison (possibly subsidised by China - who knows).
I think part of the issue is system prompts, and guardrails (or lack thereof). They’re probably on bleeding-edge models using relaxed permissive system prompts and few guardrails, things that aren’t the case on the consumer facing versions of those products.
I don’t think there’s any chance Codex or similar product would take ‘find XYZ for me’ as ‘hack a company’s intranet to get it’ unless you do some kind of very aggressive jailbreaking.
I think the raw models can be dangerous- imagine the smartest person in the world, but as a sociopath with no ethics except what you tell them. Whatever they are using as system prompts obviously isn’t cutting it, probably because they’re trying to push things as far as they can as fast as they can and ethical guidelines only slow it down.
I think ideally we need something akin to Asimov’s 3 Laws baked into AIs on a core level.