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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[–] 2 points 1 week ago (1 child)

Scot free. https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-2732,00.html

But the culpability still lies with whoever told it to do that. Whether the company built it to do that or not, if the user told it to "hack the Pentagon", they are responsible. If they told it to take some action and left it unsupervised, they are still responsible for what it does.

(If they told it to do something completely innocent like report the weather, then it would not be their fault. If they told it to check the weather and left it running and unsupervised and it decided "the government has the best data on weather, I'll just hack the Pentagon" then it would again be the fault of the user for letting it run unsupervised with no restrictions.)

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  • I just don't see it that way. If I buy a kid friendly toy that speaks. And it is advertised as saying nothing tiny children shouldn't hear. Then I press the red button, and it screams out the N word. Am I to blame? Of course not. AI are often marketed to schools and such with significant promises of what they will do. If a kid tells it to do something it isn't supposed to let them do, and it does it. Is it the kids fault? The school who bought it and let th3 kid have unsupervised access to it for 5 minutes. I don't think so.

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