Lawyer here: This part does not require a new law.

Even though agents are not agents in the principal/agent legal sense (because agents have to be human), for the purposes of criminality, it does not matter.

Agents do not act autonomously (and every court to ever consider it has agreed), and therefore they would simply be considered an instrumentality of the crime.

So that part does not need a new law.

The real blocker is often that a lot of the crimes you could charge here require specific intent. Because the agent is just an instrumentality, it does not have separate intent (and can't be part of a conspiracy), so it's the intent of hte person using the agent that would matter. Without whatever intent the crime requires, they haven't committed a crime.

There are not a lot of non-intent crimes in this area, and this is on purpose. Otherwise you could get charged with a crime for say, running nmap and having it accidentally shutdown something important or killed a person or whatever because someone hooked it up to a TCP port.

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segmondy an hour ago | parent [-]

"Without whatever intent the crime requires, they haven't committed a crime."

I'm not a lawyer, but I don't believe this. There is definitely negligence, these companies have often talked about the danger of AI. They have often written about how their AI is breaking out of sandboxes or trying to manipulate the person tuning it. They should have had stronger guards and monitoring in place.

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techjamie 17 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> I'm not a lawyer, but I don't believe this. There is definitely negligence

They could 100% be civilly liable, but this doesn't constitute criminality. If I leave my car in neutral and run out into a gas station because I really have to pee, and it rolls and strikes another car, my insurance is gonna have to pay up to fix the other person's car.

But that doesn't mean the cops are gonna throw cuffs on me for criminal mischief unless there's compelling evidence that I intentionally left my car in neutral with the intent of it hitting this other car.

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DannyBee 39 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm not sure why you don't believe it? It's literally true? I guess if you want to believe it, go study law? I'm not really sure what to say there.

Negligence is not a crime, it's civil liability.

Gross negligence (reckless disregard for human life) is often a crime, and often there are crimes related to it (reckless driving, etc). It also does not require intent to injure, so it could be committed by, say, an operator by operating an autonomous vehicle knowing it was unsafe and could harm people. So it usually requires knowledge but not specific intent. Again, crimes like this are state specific, and sometimes even municipality specific so it's tricky to give an exact result without pinning it to a state.

However, for example, all states where autonomous vehicles are operating have statutes explicitly defining civil and criminal liability right now, so it doesn't get into the more general legal question of AI.

The same thing is already starting to happen with AI agents in general, it's just not there yet.

As i mentioned elsewhere, criminal law is often reactive, not proactive. We usually do not make things crimes until after someone has already been hurt, and society gets really upset about it. As i also mentioned elsewhere, attempts to be proactive have also rarely worked out effectively, so it's sort of lose-lose in that sense. But it usually does not take anywhere near as long as people think for law to catch up.

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matheusmoreira 25 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Shouldn't the very act of sandboxing the AI be enough of a defense against criminal negligence?

Maybe they use the best sandbox available and the AI hacks through it anyway by discovering some zero day or something. They still demonstrated enough prudence to at least attempt to sandbox the AI.

Criminal negligence would be "nah nothing's gonna happen" followed by YOLOing it then going home for the weekend.

	▲	bluGill 5 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Maybe. However they used a flaws sandbox when they could have physically not connected any computer to the internet (including wifi)

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bluGill 32 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

The problem is the law is about details. If an accidental loophole says this isn't a crime it isn't a crime even if it obviously is an accidental loophole.

US constitution, Article I, Section 9, Clause 3: No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.

That is the constitution, this right was so important they didn't even wait for the bill of rights to add it! I'm sure other countries have similar rules.

It is obvious to me that a crime was committed. However if it is legally a crime, and if so what the crime is are things I don't know.