But what do you honestly expect would happen? It’s “an accident” with no actual damages.

Criminal Cases of 'hacking' require specific intent. What you're asking is that the prosecution attempt to prove Open AI intended to infiltrate Huggingface maliciously, all while the victim is saying 'no harm no foul'.

No offense but prosecutors have better things to do with their time.

If I steal $100000 from you, and you decide you value your relationship with me more than you value that $100000? Yep, you can just decide to let me have it and let it slide.

Believe it or not, deciding that you weren't wronged and not suing isn't a crime. It happens all the time. What people do with each other is up to them.

Did Bob allow his friend Jack to borrow his truck? No. Does Bob want to sue Jack for taking his truck anyway, and driving it into a ditch? No. Does Jack owe Bob big time for the mess he caused? Yes, but not in any formal legally binding way.

This works for corporations too. When two corporations find themselves at odds, threat of legal action is often used by one company against another as a leverage to resolve things behind closed doors instead. In a more amicable fashion - with no legal expenses of a protracted court battle and no loss of reputation on either side.

I agree with your stance mostly. I get the sentiment, but both of your examples seem civil to me. Both of those situations can and ideally should be resolved out of the courts, and neither carry social weight.

If one entity is injured by another, and subsequently made whole, however the two parties define that, then it is none of my business.

Actually there's another reason too: because it discourages marketing stunts. Personally I don't think that's what this was, but for the people who do think it was a marketing stunt: you guys should be pushing extra hard for prosecution here. If people can go to jail for AI-alarmism-as-marketing, that makes it a lot less likely to happen again. At the very least, the investigation and discovery process during the prosecution would show us the documents about whether it was a stunt or not, instead of taking OAI's word for it.

If you're smaller than OpenAI, you are liable. If you're larger than OpenAI, they are liable.

Setting up is not operating.

There's no indication of there having been a human in the loop during its operation: nobody was approving its tool calls, and nobody instructed it to commit these specific actions during its run (via prompting or steering).

There's no indication of any supervision of its operation either: OpenAI's engineers acted with significant delay, long after the agent has already meandered its way through their own infrastructure first.

Given that setting up this contraption in an insufficiently secure manner is almost certainly already a legal liability of equal significance, rejecting this very clear structural distinction is not necessary. That is unless someone is biased towards not wanting to grant the label of autonomy to it, in which case yes, this is absolutely spiritualistic reasoning, hence my point.

I do not want regulation to ride on people's nebulous identification on what specific traits and labels count as human-exclusive. Not just because I deeply disagree that e.g. autonomy would [0], but also because it is entirely unnecessary, for the reasons you also lay out. The agent having operated autonomously doesn't wash OpenAI of responsibility - so why reject the label, if not on a spiritualistic basis?

[0] thousands of years old idea that it is not, by the way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automaton -- see also existing regulation recognizing this idea and working with it fine

Edit: one might also want to consider if the law should bite different if there was a human in the loop, or if there were explicit instructions for the agent to take unlawful actions. I'd say yes, and then that also requires this distinction to exist.