This is laying the groundwork for massive white collar crimes being blamed on AI.

Right now, the way it works is the 'corporations are people' loophole where your company is liable for problematic things.

This further fuzzes the chain of responsibility. Suppose the CEO and CTO discuss an issue, something the company is having trouble with. The CTO discusses the possibility of AI solving the problem at lunch. A junior engineer points GPT 10 at it to see what happens. It 'solves' the problem in a creative manner. No trace of this survives after a week really. Nobody realizes what happened for six months.

Now there are so many moving pieces here that you can pretty much weasel out of anything.

The scary thing is that this logic makes perfect sense. Which means that it's probably going to happen.

This is the thing that surprised me most about this incident... This was so clearly a crime in my eyes.

If I build an explosive and while testing it it kills several people I can't just say, "sorry about that, I'll be more careful next time". I understand that's a more extreme example, but perhaps we should be grateful this agent swarm only decided to attack HF instead of critical infrastructure...

Even if this was genuinely an accident the world simply can't work this way. If a company wants to build something that can be used in destructive and illegal ways they must be responsible for ensuring those risks are mitigated. And if they don't take reasonable steps to mitigate those risks then they should be held legally liable.

Maybe for now we can argue the leading AI lab was just naive to the harms of the AIs they're building, but going forward that naivety can't be an excuse.