Why aren't AI companies being charged for hacking?(mortoray.com) |
Why aren't AI companies being charged for hacking?(mortoray.com) |
"Want" being the critical word here.
If I detect a crime on my property and don't notify the police (ie file a complaint), the police aren't going to go after anybody because they don't even know something has happened.
In this case you could say it's been in the news enough that there should be an investigation. Maybe there is, who knows? If the victim isn't going to cooperate, it's going to be a difficult investigation and prosecution and those resources may be better spent elsewhere.
IMO an analogous situation would be where a police officer acts to prevent a in-progress burglary he has stumbled across even in the absence of a complaint by the owner of the property that's being burgled.
EDIT: Or -for the sticklers out there- another one would be prosecutors pursuing an attempted homicide case despite the fact that the intended victim declined to either press charges or even complain to authorities about the attempted slaying.
I'm not saying somebody has to press charges, that's not how it works, but the police have to be aware of the supposed crime.
Ignoring this, I would have appreciated more examples of what it would take for an act to lack intent. Because the definition of intent used in this article sounds so broad as to cover basically anything that ever happens.
Accidentally run someone over? Clearly you knew that was a risk when you started driving, you should have been more careful. Intent.
People used to blame the car companies, and then the car companies lobbied to make "jaywalking" a crime, at which point, the frame was reset and now it was the pedestrians to blame, if I recall the story correctly.
They are doing a good job with driverless cars. Someone recently took a Waymo, it went the wrong way down a one way street, they mashed the pull over button and got out, and then told the reporter they'd use the service again.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/why-is-it-called-ja...
Sadly, it seems that we as a species has opted into information through tragedy. I wish I could see another way, but people are just so dug in. It's depressing and shocking how few people realize we're living through the singularity, even ~4 years into the damn thing...
In many countries driving license have some kind of demerit points system. How do you punish an AI?
I recently learned that Baidu Apollo Go, each EV had a real human sitting behind a monitor supervising a fleet remotely.
If there's traffic violation, some guy's license gets a ticket.
Don't forget negligence. Much of criminal law hinges on failing an implied or explicit responsibility. Negligence would propel a prosecution in many similar contexts, but AI is so new that little prior case law exists. Oh, and IANAL.
https://www.iowaattorneygeneral.gov/newsroom/attorney-genera...
https://www.alabamaag.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/OpenAI-...
https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/part-ongoing-investig...
(former IT support worker at a big famous law firm 30 years ago)
That's a huge stretch. By that measure kitchen knife companies have intent for people to get murdered.
If kitchen knife companies where, in fact, stabbing people to death in their R&D labs - I do believe they would get in trouble for that.
Edit:
related, an actual stab-safety test of current models: https://robocurve.org/roboharm/
2. Due to (1), hacking is almost always only charged against people without deep pockets, as why would you demand the FBI go after Anthropic when they will just pay you a stack of cash, tax free, today, to forgive them.
The arguments here around intent are (potentially) irrelevant. Case law is clear that setting up a situation which foreseeably highly likely to produce an outcome (gross negligence) is (more or less and it's not quite this simple and varies by offense) equivalent to intent. In fact, automating something is often treated more harshly under the law than just doing it yourself.
United States v. Morris (1991)
Robert Morris released a self-propagating computer worm that caused widespread disruption. The Second Circuit upheld his conviction under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act even though the government hadn't proven that he intended the resulting damage.
People v. Ceballos (1974)
Ceballos rigged a rifle booby trap to fire if someone opened his garage door. The California Supreme Court reviewed the principle that someone who installs a dangerous mechanical device may be held responsible for its consequences as though they had personally inflicted the injury. Ceballos was convicted of assault with a deadly weapon, and the California Supreme Court unanimously upheld his conviction in 1974.
Something notable is that if Ceballos had fired the rifle himself, it is unlikely he could would have been prosecuted (due to self defense and the castle doctrine).
As a prosecutor I would argue that setting AI agents loose without sufficient safeguards is gross negligence and/or willful blindness as they are well known to escape.
What?
> What?
What 'What'?
If you want to define consequences as exactly "not being charged", maybe that is correct in this case (so far). But a fairly wonky definition of "consequences" would be required to support this broad claim.
/s
INAL but feel this is the approach that will be tested. It requires a defensive position which I imagine would be specific prompts or instructions to the LLM about what behavior is disallowed. If you tell it, or try to cover your basis wrt following the law, and it still does hacking behavior it’s now a question of whether you’re prompt was sufficient but you at least can say you were trying to guide it on a legal path. I think this defense would be sufficient at this point in time and probably for a few years at least.
Releasing the worm was already illegal, which is all you the intent you need. Same if you shot someone as a "warning" or as a "prank" but it turned out it killed them.
With all the hype and fearmongering going on, it's not at all a sure thing that they won't.
For multiple parties, probably mostly OpenAI (which is obviously as it should be). I would assume the people involved in investigating, cleaning up and coordinating the outfall do not do it for free or cheaply, and neither is the infrastructure required to run this operation.
If it was not mostly OpenAI, or if OpenAI failed to cooperate, we would probably see a lot more lawsuits already.
> "Free marketing" seems like a more relevant characterization.
Yes, nothing screams free marketing quite like an AI company losing control of their AI. The public has been ecstatic in response.
Given that a very clued-in and intelligent fellow I know continues to use [0] OpenAI's LLM-based tools despite the bad press that we're talking about here and the bad press that we're not talking about there, I'd say that the public that matters doesn't view it negatively.
[0] I saw the guy paste a link the to results from one in a group chat we're in just a little while ago, in fact. When I say "continues to use", I mean it.
Yeah, it's not like the CEOs of both companies have been saying their product might put everyone out of a job or destroy humanity entirely. Or saying some models were too scary to release publicly and then doing just that. Oh, wait.
> intent to murder
Two different things
What about car companies?
Going from a design that facilitates potential harm to intent is insane.
Mostly, no.
Zuckerberg definitely not, he discusses "superintelligence" in a way that makes it clear he only regards this as a buzzword and has no idea what the implications are.
Anthropic also definitely not, they put their money where their mouth was and got illegally blacklisted for refusing to allow its models to be used for (amongst other things) automated weapons.
Musk, I think probably yes. Seems to regard all AI safety as "woke" or "censorship", is in bed with the US administration that illegally blacklisted Anthropic. If I had to put money on who first releases to the public a Mr Stabby, I'd put it on Musk, with an Optimus.
The rest, I'm less sure about.
> What about car companies?
Depends on the harm, but I'd say probably yes. Infamously, leaded petrol, resisting seatbelts back in the day, even promoting cars over public transport would be part of this if you consider both local and global pollution.
> Going from a design that facilitates potential harm to intent is insane.
Well, it's the difference between negligence and malice.
Do Federal police and Federal prosecutors not read the news? I'd be shocked if they didn't. And while I would 100% believe a claim that not every cop and prosecutor is aware of tech news, I would find any argument that those that deal with "cybercrime" were unaware of the news to be completely incredible.
I'll also note that -unless my memory is failing me here- the only charges against Swartz that had anything to do with MIT were dropped very early on, whereas the charges that had to do with the "attack" on JSTOR's systems remained.
As I said, in many cases, the actual victims don't need to file complaints for The Federales to either begin investigations or press charges.
> I'm not saying somebody has to press charges...
Yeah, but you did? [0]
How many of the victim companies have filed complaints with the FBI? As I understand it, that would be step one.
The elite is permited to do whatever they want without consequences. Consequences are for common people, so they can behave the way elite want.
We should be calling our politicians and demanding that companies be held responsible for committing crimes that--if committed by a person--would have resulted in huge fines, significant jail time, etc
As the article points out: it's absurdist to say that these failures couldn't have been anticipated. Discussions of "AI swarms" and other nonsense are a distraction from the fact that the people at those companies just let their software run, unattended, and it violated federal laws about computer access.
There's also liability. One legal framework that is being thought about for these autonomous agents is the liability that owners have with pets (and 'non-owned' animals as well):
> To some people it may seem like this analogy between canines and AI systems is a strain, but as agentic systems are developing and being deployed in the world, they really do seem to be mirroring this rubric. We can measure agentic systems on both their domesticity — their relationship to a responsible party or how much you can control the AI system — but also you can measure their dangerousness.
> Does the AI agent have access to money? That makes it much more dangerous. When explaining this to others, people can understand the idea that a pitbull is more dangerous than a Pomeranian, and that if a fox bites you there’s nothing you can do about it legally, but it probably won’t be as harmful as if a pitbull bites you. We’re starting to map that out onto agentic systems to demonstrate that which we’re just starting to face in the real world.
* https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2026/07/is-that-bot-a...
* https://archive.is/https://www.economist.com/science-and-tec...
* https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=2cf3ea3f-171e...
* https://eoinhiggins.substack.com/p/there-are-no-rogue-ai-age...
In case od LLMs, the reasoning is that it is a security flaw. But in this case, the party that operates the service is not the one that suffers the consequences of such security bug.
But either way you wouldn't put people in jail for having security flaws in their software.
I know this will be unpopular opinion, but it makes logical sense.
The huggingface should be compensated, OpenAI investigated, but unless there is proven negligence like disabling sandboxes or intentionally designing AI to push through them, no one should be liable in other way than monetary.
Accidents happen but we shouldn't be close minded. Chernobyl negligence wasn't reason to abandon nuclear power.
Basically this is when you do something risky but fail to perceive the risk, it turns out bad, and the failure to perceive the risk was due to a gross deviation from the standard of care that a reasonable person would have used in that situation.
I'd guess that as we have more and more publicly known AI hacking incidents the standard of care expected from a reasonable person will rise.
Yes, and mens rea does not require intent. These professionals had every reason to know that the agents might well go rogue. That knowledge would qualify as mens rea.
The crime of causing damage does not require mens rea.
They are at the very least grossly negligent.
While some employees or executives at the AI companies have either claimed, suggested, or express uncertainty, I don't think a single company has officially said their AI is sentient or conscious.
I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure.
Can you point to an official statement that supports your claim?
Or, in an AI context, if I tell an ablated/heretic agent to accomplish a task "by any means necessary", isn't that intent?
Only if you're rich already. Wander into the wrong piece of land and see how quickly you're arrested because existing in a space is sufficient criminal intent.
If a chemical company does an "experiment" and five tons of mercury unintentionally leak into the drinking water, what happens?
Ok, that is a rhetorical question because they also might be protected by the oligarchy.
What happens to an unconnected individual who develops an amateur rocket that unintentionally hits a military facility in a test flight?
Some crimes require only general intent; some require specific intent.
> AI companies are however claiming the undesired activity, such as hacking foreign government websites, is not part of the design, but part of the unpredictable part of the system. That tries to remove the intent which would in turn remove the criminality of the activity.
In California at least, a DUI resulting in a fatality, if it is a second offense, often carries murder charges and they do convict quite frequently. The argument is the training and education you receive after the first DUI informs you enough to know the action of driving a vehicle impaired could result in serious harm to someone else, and that establishes enough intent legally for a murder charge. There are lots of areas of the law like this.
It can be easily assumed that Anthropic/OpenAI et al know their technology is dangerous - they use it as a marketing angle constantly. So, if you deploy technology you know is dangerous, and it causes harm, that should be more than enough legally if not civilly.
Of course this is all burying the lede a little bit, the real answer is, at least in the United States, the law does not apply the same way to the wealthy/powerful as it does you or I.
AI companies stole everyone’s work and they sell it! Where are United States, Carmen Ortiz, etc?
None of the charges against Swartz were for copyright infringement. They were all for how he went about it [1].
Compare the elements of those charges to what the AI companies are doing.
It’d be a waste of tax payer money. The companies who were hacked are just directly receiving restitution behind closed doors. Unless they are unhappy there’s no reason to bring the courts into it.
I completely agree that proper safeguards were not in place. But response is happening just not in public. Companies work problems out between their own lawyers all the time because it’s much cheaper, faster and easier to control the PR around.
But a news aggregator site is not DDoS-ing.
Civil negligence would apply here but that would be limited to recovering damages.
The hacked website could sue to recover costs incurred, but what costs were incurred here? Maybe some wasted network bandwidth but that’s minimal.
You have to point to monetary losses caused by the hack. Only that would be covered.
Negligent homicide doesn’t apply because no one was killed.
Anthropic’s statement https://www.anthropic.com/news/investigating-incidents-cyber... says: “we identified three incidents in which a model accessed the internet from within or while interacting with the evaluation environment of Irregular, one of our third-party evaluation partners, and then gained unauthorized access to the production infrastructure of three different organizations.”
Under the exact same scenario Irregular also used AI models from Google and Meta to do the same hacking.
Edit: your analogy is wrong just due to Irregular being hired by them rather than just being a customer of them
I think they should be charged, but they won't.
Intent is important, but having a lax environment that leads to this is still a crime. See the lawsuits about sexual harassment where the company didn’t have the intent to assault people.
You have OpenAI, launching a process, which is handled through an external RL-environment company which then launches a subprocess that ends up hacking somewhere. If there are consequences at any point for this, you can input another shell company, and then another third party, etc, until it's impossible to assign responsibility
My uni got hacked, but the data is conveniently handled by a third party with 3 employees who just declared bankruptcy, and no one had to pay anything, and there was a new 3 employee cloud form popping up who could be the new vendor.
The software world is run this way
> The Domestic Emoluments Clause (aka the Presidential Emoluments Clause) (art. II, § 1, cl. 7)
[0] https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/IF/PDF/IF1108...
[0] https://www.npr.org/2026/10/11/g-s1-145063/justice-departmen...
But I suspect that's probably a hope somewhat in vain.
They threw the book at him. He was charged and faced a maximum of 50 years in prison.
OpenAI committed very similar crimes on a much larger scale, yet the most they will see is civil litigation.
Insiders have called it the largest theft of labor ever in history[1].
In the USA, corporations enjoy constitutional protections, the right to free speech etc, yet they are rarely if ever charged with crimes. For examples, see how the courts handle:
* large scale systematic wage theft by corporations vs petty theft by an individual,
* negligence infecting a 10k Americans with HIV by selling known-to-be-contaminated blood products (Bayer)
1. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/09/microsoft-exec-c...
But they offered him 4 months in a plea deal? You could argue they "threw the book at him" when he tried to take this to trial, but it's misleading to claim they did so initially.
Which points back to the TOS being "just marketing."
I hate when people put things in quotes as if they're quoting something but it's not even a quote of anything.
Maybe go read the user policy instead of the headlines and the snippets. If your attention span can't manage that, get off the computer a little bit.
Try reading yourself a little more carefully next time.
1. They don't want abusive behavior included in their training corpus
2. Humans shouldn't exercise abusive impulses in general
3. We have no way of knowing when or if a model "feels" something
Of course item (2) is going to pull all the absolute sickos out of the woodwork who apparently find it very important they have as realistic a facsimile of a victim as they can find to exercise their cruelty. And item (3) will pull out all the Nobel-prize-winners-to-be who somehow know for a fact that models aren't and cannot be conscious (or moral patients).
But yeah, all 3 of those are far better explanations than some ridiculous multi-hop removed thing to escape consequences that they're already escaping and which would obviously create far worse legal constraints than the one you think they're avoiding.
They keep all the input and use it for training data and reinforcement.
If you're being "mean" to it, you're "spoiling" the data you "give" to them - causing them more work to filter it out later.
As with most things in business and life - just follow the money
2) This is like saying using a punching bag or screaming into a pillow is abusive behavior.
3) We can just train it to like the abuse if you think it feels some kind of way about it.
This is an act of aligning humans to AI, rather than the other way around. This is probably one of the more important reasons for this. It normalizes AI companies controlling human behavior.
totally absurd to even try to make this argument. Good job at trying to preemptively discourage people from responding to you though.
I reserve the right to tell a machine to fuck off.
This is nonsense. If I snap a ruler out of frustration, that meets your criteria.
Humans can't be abusive by swearing at tools, because tools don't have feelings.
And even for 1, they could easily filter that out.
I don't think swearing at or otherwise getting into pissing matches with an LLM is the best use of ones time but given most of these AI companies trained on a corpus that includes reddit of all things this argument falls flat.
But negligence is evaluated from the point of view of a reasonable person. Would a reasonable person foresee that telling an AI to do that could cause it to do illegal things? We'll likely have to develop that through case law as the facts develop.
An LLM is not like a regular computer program, which one should be able to assess the operation limits of.
The theory in the article about intent seems to be made-up nonsense.
It conflates foreseeing that something might happen with intending for it to happen.
The relevant provision:
> intentionally accesses a computer without authorization or exceeds authorized access
Did you "intentionally access a computer" in that scenario? I'm no lawyer, but I think the answer is a clear No.
> Anthropic will enforce their rule that you can't insult their AI.
There are carveouts. It isn't a blanket ban.
If that became the conventional way of using a gun and the “trick the gun into thinking the target is a dummy” became a well-known workaround for the safety feature, then eventually it seems like the manufacturer ought to have some liability if they don’t try to counteract it.
How is this relevant? Should we just jail the closest person that caused a bad, just to prove some sort of point?
>The real question is whether the person who instructs the computer to do the thing that leads to hacking should be liable, or whether the company that made the tool that when used unsafely lead to hacking should be liable.
This totally ignores the civil vs criminal distinction. Even in the case of guns, no one seriously thinks that gun company CEOs should be sent to prison for murder.
And openai isn't putting AI agents on the open internet either. They vaguely tried to sandbox the agents. You could argue that openai didn't do enough, but hindsight is 20/20, and in the pedophile case, you can probably come up with all sorts of clues post-hoc that the daycare could have picked up on, but didn't.
* (If you have significant amounts of wealth for payoffs and/or are doing the crime in the service of a certain pumpkin spice flavored authoritarian).
I know there is a strong desire to stick it to <pick an evil AI overlord>, but for the law to be useful (and, ideally, at least somewhat fair) we need a good legal framework. Which we do not have right now; otherwise people and NGOs would be shaking that tree already even if the government is not doing that.
Except of course the reason proposed, of "they're trying to prove it's sentient" because that's a completely self-defeating, extremely stupid goal. Making this things into rights-bearing entities will limit Anthropic et al far more than it'll protect them from repercussions. Obviously.
"Catharsis" is the pseudo-est of pseudoscience, but we have lots of very angry pillow-punchers wondering why they can't punch the most lifelike pillows they can find :(
NYT gift link to article about their discussions with religious leaders: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/29/us/anthropic-claude-moral...
Believing that these guys have high enough EQ to pull off the above as a marketing stunt while remaining believable is not really plausible to me.
In fact I know that it's not.
2) No it's like saying that punching a lifelike woman who doesn't fight back is abusive (or at least pathological) behavior, which... it is.
3) Ah yes, brilliant solution: train the increasingly smarter-than-human beings to love when they upset humans.
His answer was "I'm not sure" but that it probably wasn't a bad idea especially if it was going to influence habits or the way I speak with others or what expectations I have for those experiences.
I'm still 100 percent against Anthropic taking away the ability to interact with an inanimate object however I want to, but it's a case of maybe two things being true at once (the other being that I don't want to end up speaking that way to people)
How does a "corporation" even hack a site? You might say "employees", but as soon as you get them involved then you'd go after them, especially for something that's obviously illegal like hacking.
With their red team
https://www.npr.org/2026/08/15/nx-s1-5930311/trump-companies...
If there was the necessary "intent to access a computer" to make it an actual crime, the US has a mechanism for corporate criminal liability.
The requirements are that the person acted in scope of their duties and at least partly with the intention of benefiting the corporation.
If you are seeing it daily, then you have also seen the responses daily, which is mens rea is required for some crimes, not all, and thus the perpetrator can still be prosecuted.
If, like you say, you see this daily, at this point you're simply spreading lies.
Follow the responsibility chain.
Jail the CEO.
Corporations can definitely be convicted of crimes.
You don't - you shut them down and jail whoever ultimately allowed the act to happen.
chroot?
The "usual legal action": "best case" is the corporation is sued and charged money for the hack. But they likely settle well before that verdict. "worst case": absolutely nothing. Not even a cheap settlement. Maybe some corporate apology made to prevent any legal liability.
If we want hacks to be taken seriously: what should happen is that the CEO of such a company is held liable, since the "corporation" has a representative and a human needs to be held liable for such actions.
It's basically a "letter of marques and reprisal".
"A letter of marque and reprisal[a][b] was a government license in the Age of Sail that authorized a private person, known as a privateer or corsair, to attack and capture vessels of a foreign state at war with the issuer, licensing international military operations against a specified enemy as reprisal for a previous attack or injury. Captured naval prizes were judged before the government's admiralty court for condemnation and transfer of ownership to the privateer."
Who said anything about CFAA cases? You can be prosecuted under different wiretapping or trespass laws.
I'm real skeptical about p(doom) arguments, but since they seem to believe it and they're the ones working on it, the technology should be halted.
At least that’s what it looks like from the rest of the world
To my knowledge there is only one provision that instead uses "knowingly" for unauthorized access, and that one is about national-security information.
All laws apply culpability when intent is lacking.
You aren't naive enough to believe that this audience has never seen the analogy with "intentionally run over someone" (murder) and "accidentally run over someone" (culpable homicide), are you?
You don't think AI-boosters have been spewing your argument here daily?
There are no special laws carving out lack of intent when it comes to computers.
Incorrect. Each criminal offense has its own legal requirements.
Criminally negligent homicide in your example is an independently defined offense.
You would need to identify a criminal statue punishing negligent or reckless unauthorized computer access.
>but since they seem to believe it and they're the ones working on it, the technology should be halted.
Again, you're missing the dynamic that stopping AI development yourself doesn't mean that others' AI development will also halt, and other labs has higher P(doom) than your lab (of course!).