A lot of people are already responding either "Yes" or "No", but I have a slightly different take.

The guy is liable for damages. If no damages were caused, there's no lawsuit. The government doesn't put people on trial for unauthorized access (unlike, say, murder). Someone needs to file charges.

However, if the guy _were_ sued by his gym for damages, it should be his perogative to ultimately sue Anthropic to cover the damages and the legal fees.

The system is set up this way on purpose. You can't sue another party on someone else's behalf. The gym can't even prove that Claude did it - the guy might be full of shit. They sue the accountable party (the person who accessed the site without authorization) and then the accountable party is free to sue the tool maker for selling a dangerous tool negligently.

edit: damn actually tecoholic said this too and i missed it. well, anyway i agree with that guy.

▲ rcxdude 2 hours ago | parent [-]

With a civil suit you can sue multiple parties. It wouldn't be unusual, if the gym decided to sue, for them to sue the guy and anthropic in the same lawsuit.

▲ MobiusHorizons an hour ago | parent [-]

I think you would have to sue the party that did the hacking (ie anthropics servers) not the party that benefited, unless Claude used his computer in yolo mode to hack the gym, in which case I think I would find it hard to blame anthropic.

▲ shagie 43 minutes ago | parent [-]

> unless Claude used his computer in yolo mode to hack the gym

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-10/ai-assistant-hacks-gy...

    Earlier this year, Andrew, who works for an Australian company that sells AI products to businesses, began experimenting with OpenClaw, a popular AI agent software that he used Anthropic's Claude AI service to run.
    AI agents combine a chatbot's ability to answer questions with tools that let them access the internet, email, credit cards, as well as planning and carrying out multi-step tasks.
    He decided to use the AI agent to book the class for him.

He YOLO'ed his own computer with OpenClaw.