{"id":863163,"date":"2026-09-28T04:48:10","date_gmt":"2026-09-28T04:48:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/863163\/"},"modified":"2026-09-28T04:48:10","modified_gmt":"2026-09-28T04:48:10","slug":"crime-is-still-crime-when-an-ai-is-involved-the-perps-are-the-humans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/863163\/","title":{"rendered":"Crime is still crime when an AI is involved \u2014 the perps are the humans"},"content":{"rendered":"

AI companies are sharing more news of their cutting-edge software behaving badly: potentially tens of thousands of safety incidents, some perhaps including criminal violations<\/a> \u2014 which, if so, can be handled like any other crime, holding the humans behind the tools responsible.<\/p>\n

However much the drama queens in tech, media and politics pretend otherwise, \u201crogue agents\u201d are such only because programmers enable and even encourage it.<\/p>\n

These tools aren\u2019t uncontrollable, sentient creatures: The folks behind them are the decision-makers, to blame for whatever harm their products do.<\/p>\n

For example, we now know that OpenAI actually disabled multiple \u201cguardrails\u201d<\/a> in the testing that led to the much-reported Hugging Face incident, among other parameter-setting that opened the door to an AI \u201cswarm\u201d doing a better job of hacking the competition than the testers had expected.<\/p>\n

And Sam Altman\u2019s firm paid in cash for whatever damage it did to Hugging Face, avoiding litigation that would\u2019ve cost far more \u2014 which shows that these companies have every motive to ensure they don\u2019t do massive harm, lest they lose their shirts.<\/p>\n

In another high-profile incident, a different \u201crogue AI\u201d went after Australian government info, accessing data . . . that was already public. Had it done actual harm, we expect actual damages again would have been paid.<\/p>\n

\t\t\tMore From\t\t\t\t\t\t\tPost Editorial Board<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve yet to see news of AI doing any hacking that even approaches what humans already do, including China\u2019s regular raids<\/a> on US government databases.<\/p>\n

The most alarming tales of programs going wrong seem to involve \u201cred team\u201d\u00a0testing where the companies are trying to get their models to go rogue; that\u2019s why those same companies are now taking a break to add more and better controls to such \u201cfrontier\u201d work.<\/p>\n

Doing cutting-edge work doesn\u2019t absolve you of criminal responsibility, nor does leaking word of possible violations to Axios or Reuters change that.<\/p>\n

If this R&D winds up breaking laws (e.g., with unauthorized access), we should get a handle on what and how that\u2019s happening and impose criminal and\/or civil liability where due.<\/p>\n

(Incidentally, smart companies should also be training up defensive AIs to protect against criminal hacking: There\u2019s plainly big money to be earned in that, too.)<\/p>\n

Programmers and execs may find it useful to talk about their models as if they\u2019re self-willed, but they\u2019re not: If AI agents get on the wrong side of the law, blame and charge the people responsible \u2014 their creators and owners.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"AI companies are sharing more news of their cutting-edge software behaving badly: potentially tens of thousands of safety…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":863164,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,3071,10533,1283,1767,74],"class_list":["post-863163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-crime","tag-editorial","tag-openai","tag-opinion","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/863163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=863163"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/863163\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/863164"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=863163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=863163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=863163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}