Who should be held accountable when an AI Agent (accidentally) acts maliciously?

I don't see how this is such an unclear legal question. If I fire a computer program that mistakenly causes another person harm, its my fault. Or it would be the maker of the program's fault. I feel we have established pattern for this already.

Until we can agree whether AI is conscious, which we never will, AI and AI agents are just property working on behalf of humans.

I could see a future where AI companies/services indemnify consumers who use their agents but _not_ indemnify corporations that use their services.

I wonder if there's any legal precedent for other "not fully human intelligence" property that escapes containment and causes damage to a third party without any active malice, but nonetheless damage was caused. For example:

A. You own a large amount of cattle on a ranch.

B. Cattle are property. They're not human level of sentience, but people agree that cattle are capable of autonomous actions and going places and doing things based on their own instincts and nature.

C. Your cattle bust out of a fence on your ranch and damage something belonging to your neighbor. Let's say for the sake of an example of something cattle are known to do, they go spend a whole day rubbing up against your neighbor's car and severely scratch it and mess up the paint job on it.

D. You didn't instruct or train the cattle to cause damage, and the cattle have no actively malicious intent of their own, but nonetheless damage was caused.

Further theoretical: Your cattle wander into a major highway and cause a car wreck, the local sheriff's department is called out as part of the chaos and has to shoot some of them to put down the wounded beasts.

If a person's use of AI would cause a reasonable person to expect harm to result, the person should be accountable. Otherwise, if AI causes harm and it was used in a way that a reasonable person would not expect to result in harm, the AI company should be held accountable.

Just because a person should be accountable doesn't mean that the AI company can't also be if their service should never have allowed something to happen in the first place, but we're probably going to want actual regulations around what sort of guardrails they're expected to have.

Its been well established that blame is distributed in an inverse proportion to the various parties wealth/power/status metrics. The higher these metrics, the lower the accountability.

Both the operator of the AI agent and whomever released it. I'm sure the user agreement that companies agree to would shift the blame onto the operator but I feel that both should be held accountable.

This really is just a tool and courts should treat it as such.

I don't see this as being much different from a crane operator or airline pilot.

One of my clients has enforced a policy where a live human user principal must be supplied as a header with any requests outbound from the AI system. The effective policy is that you are completely (100%) responsible for what your agent does on your behalf. The AI system is designed to request confirmation for any potentially destructive actions.

An ordered list of officers of the company who go to jail depending on how many years must be served as determined by sentencing. Assume something like 10 years per person. If it's 300 years of sentencing, then 30 people. If the sentence exceeds the list of people, the company is nationalized. (And everybody goes to jail.)

This is a whole lot more obvious once you stop anthropomorphizing LLMs.

Nobody cares. Seriously, beyond navel gazing on social media, nobody cares.

By the time it’s an actual problem and not just these guys trying to use it for viral marketing, you’re going to have many thousands of people doing it maliciously with intent to worry about. You’re going to be flooded with Russian hackers with no recourse.

“A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision.”

– IBM Training Manual, 1979

At the moment, with LLMs the way they are, I’d say the operator.

If we reach some kind of future where LLMs are integrated into public works in some major way… I would say that could open up the possibility of the creators being held accountable (Not saying this will happen or would be good at all).

"Back in 2022, a Google employee already thought their AI model was sentient."

Sigh, this meme again

Now, imagine AI helping to operate your self-driving car.

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Mostly Scam Altman.