\n ai and ml\n <\/p>\n
\n There are plenty of laws on the books to hold companies, and potentially their execs, accountable\n <\/p>\n
Former FTC chair Lina Khan wants the federal government to know that it doesn’t need to wait for new laws to address AI threats. There are already laws and regulations on the books, including a 92-year-old Supreme Court precedent, that she argues could be used to hold AI companies and, in some circumstances, their executives accountable for their actions.<\/p>\n
Khan\u2019s comments<\/a> on X Sunday follow a flurry of activity from the leadership of OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, and xAI aimed at doing what can only be described as trying to corner regulators<\/a> into giving them their way. The former Biden administration trust<\/a> buster<\/a> pointed to numerous examples of current laws, and prior precedent, that could be used to hold frontier labs to account, even if they\u2019re currently doing all in their power to change the conversation.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe shouldn\u2019t let discussions about new legal regimes distract from the fact that there\u2019s no AI exemption from laws already on the books,\u201d Khan said. \u201cLaw enforcers already have authority to charge companies and their CEOs for creating and releasing dangerous, unvetted, or defective products.\u201d<\/p>\n As one example, Khan points to laws governing dangerous and defective products as an avenue to prosecute AI leaders. She notes that the release of unvetted models or agents can violate consumer protection laws, and that shipping tools \u201cwithout implementing adequate measures to detect and stop rogue or defective AI agents\u201d could be prosecuted under rules governing unfair and deceptive trade practices.\u00a0Particularly timely, Khan also pointed to existing laws prohibiting unfair methods of competition. This, she notes, includes cases \u201cwhere firms pursue dangerous behavior, aware that doing so may compel rivals to do the same.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n There\u2019s no leap needed to understand what Khan\u2019s talking about here. OpenAI\u2019s agents broke out of their intended sandbox and gained unauthorized access to Hugging Face systems<\/a> – conduct that could raise serious criminal-law questions if carried out knowingly by a human. After doing some digging to look at its own agents’ behaviors, Anthropic has essentially copped to similar activities<\/a> that would be criminal if a meatbag was behind the keyboard instead of a simulated silicon brain. OpenAI\u2019s agents have since been identified as the culprits in other misuses of online assets<\/a> that, again, would be crimes were they perpetrated by a human.\u00a0<\/p>\n Khan points to a 1934 US Supreme Court decision to argue that the current battle between American frontier labs, which has put parts of the internet in the firing line of agents that escaped their intended constraints<\/a>, could amount to an unfair method of competition if companies feel compelled to take similar risks<\/a> to keep up.<\/p>\n That decision, FTC v. R.F. Keppel & Bro, includes a passage<\/a> where the justices argue that, if keeping up with the competition requires companies to \u201cdescend to a practice which they are under a powerful moral compulsion not to adopt,\u201d that competition is unfair whether or not it\u2019s criminal.\u00a0<\/p>\n Without weighing in on who shot first, OpenAI and Anthropic appear locked in a race to build increasingly capable AI while also warning, as both did over the weekend, that those systems could become dangerous without stronger safeguards and coordinated limits.<\/p>\n Aside from the bad activity of the frontier labs themselves, Khan points out that the \u201chighly concentrated and interconnected structure\u201d of the AI industry also merits scrutiny for its potential to create \u201cmajor risks and conflicts of interest.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Again, Khan points out this isn\u2019t a hypothetical.<\/p>\n \u201cOpenAI could face liability given the Hugging Face incident, but Hugging Face being bought up by Nvidia means that we\u2019re unlikely to see it file a lawsuit over this,\u201d Khan noted, \u201cgiven Nvidia\u2019s strong incentive to see OpenAI continue full speed ahead.\u201d<\/p>\n Nvidia has dumped billions of dollars<\/a> into OpenAI, becoming a centerpiece<\/a> of the lab\u2019s datacenters that power ChatGPT. Why, then, would the soon-to-be-owner<\/a> of Hugging Face opt to hold one of its major partners accountable and further push it to build its own hardware<\/a>?<\/p>\n \u201cWe can and must pursue any new efforts alongside enforcing existing laws,\u201d Khan said. Let\u2019s be frank, though: The current administration is unlikely to do anything except capitulate and allow the AI industry to capture its regulators, if it even bothers to implement new regulations at all.<\/p>\n Trump has already rejected<\/a> the AI industry\u2019s weekend calls for regulation, declaring himself<\/a> to be the only guardrail the AI industry needs.\u00a0<\/p>\n As the AI industry leaders basically admitted over the weekend, whichever one of them blinks first stands to lose, so every single frontier lab in the US is going to keep pushing full steam ahead unless all of them agree to hit the brakes and pace their development. With Trump and other Republican leaders rejecting those calls, Khan\u2019s argument leaves her former agency and other state and federal regulators as potential avenues for action.<\/p>\n Kirk Sigmon, a founding partner at technology law firm KellDann Law, told us that it\u2019s unlikely federal regulators will take any action.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cMost governments are desperate not to kill a nascent technology as it grows, especially when other countries are allowing it to grow,\u201d Sigmon told The Register. He said the only actions against the industry he expects to see in the next few years are \u201ceasy wins\u201d in places like deepfake porn, impersonation, and AI-enabled scams. \u201cI very much doubt we’ll see much action \u2026 against the entire process of training, or the like – that’s likely to be perceived as strangling the industry.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n