It may, but I wonder what trial that will be. Money is a pretty good insulator.

That implies that there will be a side willing to prosecute this. You can't have Nuremberg trials when the side doing the crime is invested in never getting punished for it.

i.e. extremely well, seeing as very few Nazis (in the West) were punished, and of the few that were there were none in jail after around 1958, and West Germany was basically given back to them if they hadn't been imported into the US. Spain, where the WWII festivities began, didn't even have a change in government.

If you had typed the first sentence from you second point into, for eg, DDG and not for perpetuity on HN, you'd find a whole host of results

Instead of secondhanding your own curiosity (if it was even that and not just obstinancy) to others, it might do well to explore your questions on your own

Some eg:

https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2025/10/15/...

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/385551984_AI_in_Mil...

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2407.03453

> "it's not clear who exactly should be prosecuted?"

This is natural. The right place to start is to move the investigation from the FTC to the FBI and therein start executing search warrants. The sooner this is done, the better, as evidence can be preserved.

for (1), there are other fields where a specific (often licensed, but not necessary here) person "signs off" on the work, and accepts personal responsibility.

The responsibility is not absolute ("If anything bad happens, you get punished"), but instead relative to documented (in law and regulation) standards along with established industry standards. Issues that are resolved at trial.

I don't see why the same rules that regulate an engineer approving the plans for a bridge can't work for a security engineer approving the design of a sandbox.

No I don't have concrete evidence of bombing target selection in the training of base models (of course there's training of specialized models, at least vision ones for drone targeting), it's not like they're transparent about how they train and use AI in warfare. But if you listen to esteemed AI leaders, they're claiming the models can / almost can recursively self-learn now, and they can coordinate and find ways to persist info and hide from human operators, so it stands to reason that you shouldn't even feed these as inference material.

And on training AI for automated weapons like fighter jets, there's more concrete news: https://breakingdefense.com/2026/10/navy-shield-ai-pour-big-... US Navy and eminent, do-gooder investors like A16z, Blackstone and JPMorgan are pouring big money into these. Are your big tech "defense" contractors collaborating on these, who happen to also be at the forefront of general AI training? I have a pretty good suspicion.

Ukrainian army is using LLM in drones and they are opened with this so here is your prove

1. I'm not sure who matters that much, the point is you need to make it more cost-effective to do the right thing. It could be CEO 6 days in jail, it could be that every action requires a signed affidavidt of safety and in the lack of such an affidavidt the manager is held accountable (cascading up to CEO).

Just make it the CEO

1. Sounds like a conspiracy charge. That's fine

2. They could proactively train them to be bad at that

>The universe is not so generous as to make clearly differentiable "good" and "bad" things, more often than not they are two sides of the same coin

Let's throw the AI "good" things away too then. We can do without them. It's amazing how a tech that didn't exist commercially at all 4 years ago it's considered "indispensable" even if it's going to destroy society and/or humanity.

Or, llms are completely unreliable to be consulted on any matter of life or death in either direction. And llms should not be used in the reckless way they are currently being used. Responsibility for reckless use should fall on both the company that makes the function available and the user for improper monitoring. If proper monitoring is not possible using the tools provided by the company then the responsibility should fall on the company. And if the user and the company providing the model are the same, then the responsibility is clearly with the company.

I do not practice law but to me the AI hacking looks like mens rea. Negligence or recklessness suffice.

It goes beyond negligence here, because Anthropic employees have stated on the record that they are making and deploying products which put people at risk. That is knowing and potentially willful, which would be the highest level of mens rea in the US.

If there is no mens rea there is still civil prosecution.

All civilized countries have the concept of gross negligence where you can be prosecuted for knowingly doing something that causes harm as a side-effect.

How do you establish deliberation with the lack of transparency? You can be deliberate by not prioritizing resources in regulations, safety, ethics, etc., especially after "rogue" instances happen. If anything, I am seeing them moving to the opposite direction [1] [2].

More instances are being disclosed [3] and what are they doing about it exactly? It's just a shameless marketing technique, and they will keep doing it until they are held accountable.

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2026/10/08/tech/fired-open-ai-resear...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49257160

[3] https://fortune.com/2026/10/16/openai-discloses-four-more-ro...

Drs can both go to prison, and be banned from practicing medicine if their actions (or inactions) lead to patient harm AND they violate the standards of their profession.

HN seems to have an incredibly poor understanding of what Mens Rea means or how it’s applied.

You don’t need someone to jump up, wave their arms and scream “I meant to do it!” to establish intent.

It can be established in any way deemed believable by a jury including repeating the same action that leads to a similar outcome multiple times.

It’s even been instructed to juries that they can find intent in the deliberate decision to not seek out the likely outcome of performing an action.

I think "deliberately" is really hard to prove because very few lawmakers have an understanding of how agentic large language models work

I would say pointing an "internal research" model at a task with zero monitoring clearly is deliberate behaviour. And the team involved should be prosecuted to the full extent of law.

What should be introduced in AI safety bills are clear ways of monitoring and curtailing model behaviour.

It is not hard to get an AI model to use an append only log and that can be cryptographically secured with PQ security. And we will know when a model is being deceptive.

Amen.

I would personally agree with RICO charges, but the main task is to simply start investigating and cross the bridge of the actual charges later.