Do you have any legal expertise or is this pulled straight from your ass?

Part of that is by design. The entire point of incorporating a business is to separate it as a legal entity from you, the person who owns/runs it.

Unless you can point to someone at OpenAI intentionally using their software to hack the Australian government's website, the best you can do is have some drawn-out proceeding where you charge OpenAI, the corporation, with some sort of crime, convict them (of what I don't know, IANAL) and fine them. Hopefully the fine is 1) large and 2) sticks through the appeals process.

There's no real mechanism to legally punish the likes of Altman and his c-suite over this.

Imagine if any of the name brand military contractors were caught wiretapping an ally? Or launching a weapon? Would not look good at all.

I imagine this will be treated without recourse like usual because the entire economy relies on this company and 1 other succeeding at all costs. But, wars have started over less...

I have seen coding agents on my own machine (in sandboxed VMs) start doing things while trying to accomplish what I've asked that I felt sort of exceeded my mandate (changing database passwords, poking at the egress proxy that's preventing them from accessing some domains). Not to the point of causing any real issues, but I don't have much trouble envisioning scenarios like this when using stronger instructions around pursuing the goal + a running in a misconfigured sandbox envrionment.

That said, there's a lot of potential upside for American AI labs if they're able to get people scared about AI, they can:

- To your point, claim the regulations slowed them down and paper over near/mid term financial concerns

- Get the government to create stupid regulations that don't actually slow them down at all, but do effectively lock out any future competition (and current global competition)

- Position themselves as the only organizations blessed by the government with the ability to make safe AI, therefore eventually allowing them to claim to be some flavor of "too big to fail" and worthy of a bailout, should the financials not work out.

- Effectively create a distraction that avoids further public conversation/accountability/regulation/liability re the more tangible sorts of problems their products cause right now.

Why not, isn’t that classic misaligned AI behaviour?

Oh, he does. It's unlikely that this is some AGI that spawned itself out of nothing and started doing this. If he were a decent person, he'd simply find a way to investigate this internally, fire the people responsible, and find a way to set up guardrails around his product.

The problem is, like most people in SV, Altman seems to have a twisted ethical compass. He doesn't see these incidents as an issue, he sees them as an opportunity. He has both the thing a bunch of Western governments want (a superhacker agent that can do dirty work) and a crisis that can be used to craft regulations that favor OpenAI and thus his bank account.

Compare with the Bluetouff affair (2014) :

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/02/french-journalis...

NotE how he was found guilty by the 2nd court for something more 'subjective' than 'objective' : for having confessed that he later found an authentication page that had failed to protect the documents.

How can you make a swarm of agents "feel guilty" ?

One can find many other logical combinations that we can’t possibly know about such incidents.

And Dario and Sam have already made it clear that it's America First.

The rest of the world isn't going to accept a regulatory regime which imposes American hegemony. Maybe when Silicon Valley was playing all utopian like they used to. Not now.

Open weights is the most reasonable counter-power we have.

Why did you even link that article when it doesn't help your point?

I supports the idea that the person responsible or an animal is held liable - it just makes clarificaitons on common sense caveates like when a professional is moving the animal. It even doubles down on making it clear that expected behavior of an animal is taken into account even if unlikely, like how ai swarms have a reasonable potential to just go awry and commit cyber crimes.