If your agent commits a crime, who is responsible?

8/19/2026 at 3:56:13 PM

Depends. If you’re a large company, it’s okay.

If you’re a random person, straight to jail.

by az226

8/19/2026 at 4:16:02 PM

If you owe the bank 100k, you have a problem. If you owe the bank 100M, then the bank has a problem.

by qznc

8/20/2026 at 12:15:31 AM

“When you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”

by Smoosh

8/19/2026 at 4:03:21 PM

I forget the name of the document. But, the US military has a declaration that boils down to "When something goes wrong, blame cannot be shrugged off onto a machine. Somewhere in the chain of responsibility a human will be held accountable." Maybe the operator, the commanding officer, the vendor, maybe even all the way back to a software engineer. But, everyone can't hide behind the machine.

by corysama

8/19/2026 at 9:28:05 PM

“A computer can never be held accountable” is from an internal IBM presentation

by jrflowers

8/19/2026 at 11:11:20 PM

That was the previous military, before the Hegeseth purge.

I've yet to see responsibility taken for the killing of more than 100 innocent school children in the first day of U.S. strikes on Iran.

by iAMkenough

8/20/2026 at 8:52:15 AM

This is not talked about enough.

It is a terrible stain on America.

by verzali

8/19/2026 at 4:10:25 PM

The US military seems like an organization where there is very little accountability given all the people they kill in training accidents, the number of procurement mishaps they have, or their continuous inability to pass an audit.

So I imagine that if the military is the guidance for how we handle this in the future, there will be paperwork, shrugs, and perhaps some performative rage when an agent commits a crime.

by throwawaysleep

8/19/2026 at 4:14:09 PM

Responsible and accountable can be very different things. For example, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsibility_assignment_matr...

by qznc

8/19/2026 at 3:53:11 PM

If a dog bites someone, does the dog pay the medical bills or the owner? This is why you keep your dog on a leash and get liability insurance. I feel like this is already settled case law.

by fhdkweig

8/19/2026 at 3:54:28 PM

In the UK if your dog bites someone you are responsible, if your cat bites someone no one is responsible. Which settled case law do we follow?

by chownie

8/19/2026 at 4:07:08 PM

> if your cat bites someone no one is responsible.

I had to double take there. Its because of the dangerous dogs act.

However there appears to be a nuance that if your cat is know to be a bitey little shit, and you let it out to into a situation where it might bite someone then you are responsible.

I think it gets murky if you are taking your animal into other people's property though. On your own property you have a duty of care to visitors (ie hidden man traps are not allowed, but clearly marked and cordoned off bottomless pits are)

by KaiserPro

8/19/2026 at 10:44:23 PM

Considering the saying that dogs have masters and cats have slaves, not only you are not responsible if your cat bites someone but your cat should also be responsible if you bite someone.

As for agents, it depends on your relationship with it. For now, most people command agents, so the dog rule should apply. But if you believe the "superintelligence" crowd, we should apply the cat rule soon.

by GuB-42

8/19/2026 at 4:05:33 PM

If you are out walking your cat, and the cat bites someone, you should be responsible for that... I suspect the ruling distinguishes between pets that are out in public, vs generally private. But laws don't have to make sense to be laws... we have lots of nonsense laws.

by altruios

8/19/2026 at 4:13:28 PM

> If you are out walking your cat, and the cat bites someone, you should be responsible for that... I suspect the ruling distinguishes between pets that are out in public, vs generally private.

The distinction is in the responsibility it's reasonable for the cat owner to take vs the dog owner. Cats are free spirits, if your cat decides to pop out the cat flap for a fight there's really not much you can do about that. The law isn't even 100% on what to do when your cat decides to go and live in another house down the road. Are those homeowners involuntary bailees or thieves?

It turns out applying laws for a controlled animal (dogs) doesn't work, so the best we can do is try for half-way between a pet and property. My expectation is that AI is similar and there is no "aha, it's so easy, just do as we do for foo" as is proposed.

by chownie

8/20/2026 at 6:34:58 AM

Really? You can’t be sued for, say, doctor bills incurred by your cat scratching or biting someone so badly they need stitches, when you failed to take reasonable care of the cat and knew it had a tendency to bite and scratch people?

by otterley

8/19/2026 at 4:09:47 PM

So now we have the question if coding agents are more like cats or dogs.

by yomismoaqui

8/19/2026 at 4:17:35 PM

Interview 1,000 people about:

1. Are you a cat person or a dog person?

2. How do you feel about AI agents?

And then determine which answers have a higher correlation.

by mcphage

8/19/2026 at 3:57:46 PM

If I’m walking your dog and it bites someone, am I responsible or you? Does the manner in which I was controlling them matter?

by hhmc

8/19/2026 at 4:02:32 PM

This is why we have a court system.

by lotu

8/19/2026 at 5:07:08 PM

But this is counter to the claim it's (simple) settled case law

by hhmc

8/19/2026 at 8:46:37 PM

It’s quite settled and there is precedent that would answer who is responsible and to what amount. There’s not a situation where only the dog is responsible.

by prepend

8/19/2026 at 4:08:03 PM

Imagine your dog had a dog trainer and you didn’t know the dog had been trained to bite under those circumstances. You might have a case against the trainer.

by moomin

8/19/2026 at 4:10:15 PM

you, the dog owner, would have a case against the trainer.

you, the person being bitten, would not give two craps about some story from the dog owner about how they hired a bad dog trainer who against their wishes secretly trained them to bite people.

you have been bitten. you have a case against the owner of the dog who bit you.

by orf

8/19/2026 at 9:42:20 PM

I think you're trying to uninvent tort law here.

by moomin

8/19/2026 at 4:02:09 PM

[dead]

by cindyllm

8/16/2026 at 4:26:38 PM

I find it obvious that if a person allowed an agent to do things on behalf of themselves or their company (e.g. send emails, sign contracts, update websites, etc.), they are responsible for the results.

by ventana

8/19/2026 at 3:51:51 PM

Are sure this actually the case, legally speaking?

I can definitely see someone being able to mount a good criminal defence case that they aren’t responsible for misrepresentations that an LLM agent makes on, for example, a loan application, if they sincerely intended to use the agent for non-fraudulent purposes. There won’t be intent, so they aren’t responsible outside of strict liability.

by trollbridge

8/19/2026 at 3:55:39 PM

I'm not a lawyer so no comment on the actual legality, but it feels like the issue in your example is more akin to negligence than it is ill intent. That an LLM can misrepresent / hallucinate things is foundational to the technology.

by holden_nelson

8/19/2026 at 7:09:31 PM

I feel it's somewhat similar to using TurboTax or other online services to file your taxes. For those not in the US, the tax forms have a special field to fill in if the form was prepared by a paid preparer (licensed, I guess); TurboTax and other online services leave that field blank so you, as a taxpayer, are responsible for all possible mistakes that you didn't see in the forms you signed and sent.

I feel it's very similar to using an agent; the main difference is that we kind of trust that TurboTax won't hallucinate in your forms, while the agent surely will.

by ventana

8/19/2026 at 8:40:11 PM

Even if you fill in the preparer, the IRS still holds you responsible. For interest, penalties, and potential crimes.

by prepend

8/19/2026 at 7:13:48 PM

TurboTax has a guarantee. If they fuck up, it’s their fault and they will fix it. If Claude fucks up, Anthropic gives zero rats asses what happens to you afterward.

by bradgranath

8/21/2026 at 1:38:18 PM

TurboTax's guarantee has no value beyond marketing to potential TurboTax customers.

by trollbridge

8/19/2026 at 7:42:45 PM

They won't defend you from IRS if you underpaid the tax, and "sorry I used TurboTax" is not a valid excuse.

by ventana

8/19/2026 at 8:26:30 PM

A great number of things that people in chat rooms “can definitely see” end up sounding awfully ridiculous in court.

by singleshot_

8/19/2026 at 4:15:27 PM

> I can definitely see someone being able to mount a good criminal defence case that they aren’t responsible for misrepresentations that an LLM agent makes on, for example, a loan application, if they sincerely intended to use the agent for non-fraudulent purposes. There won’t be intent, so they aren’t responsible outside of strict liability.

i mean, no? how would that be a good defence? "yes your honour, i lied on a loan application and committed fraud, but it was a mistake! i promise!" - that's... yeah. fine. it's not exactly unique.

regardless, it's _you_ making the loan application. not the agent. your failure to check it is on you.

by orf

8/19/2026 at 4:07:41 PM

Your sign the document affirming that the information is accurate.

by lupire

8/19/2026 at 7:10:21 PM

If you on purpose press enter, and run code you know nothing about, it’s still on you for pressing enter.

by bradgranath

8/19/2026 at 4:02:02 PM

What about this case? Should the LLM user be charged with hacking their gym website?

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn0nww2qlp7o

by csbrooks

8/19/2026 at 4:44:20 PM

There's not really enough info in the article to decide. I'd have no problem with him going to court and having to show to a jury that he used the bot in a way that no reasonable person would have expected to result in the website being hacked. If that was found to be the case, the company who made the chatbot would be responsible for the harms caused to the gym, and the user, including all of the legal costs he incurred by having to defend himself.

As for the people who couldn't attend the pilates class because of the hack, it's the gym who should be held accountable for that because they designed their system in such an insecure and negligent way that it failed to protect their data and resulted in them losing their place.

by autoexec

8/19/2026 at 3:57:54 PM

[dead]

by danggggg

8/19/2026 at 11:57:02 PM

If you're using a car to commit a crime we blame the driver not the car.

When there's a gun shooting we don't blame the gun we blame the user.

People commit crimes. They might use a computer, a baseball bat or a hammer. We don't hold the computer, baseball bat or hammer responsible.

by johannesrexx

8/20/2026 at 12:37:49 AM

But if the car explodes or gun misfires, we blame the manufacturer. The answer requires context.

by JumpCrisscross

8/20/2026 at 6:44:25 AM

If I remember my torts course in law school correctly, defective product liability law usually only kicks in when someone is physically injured by the product.

by otterley

8/20/2026 at 7:17:15 AM

Property damage doesn't count?

by JumpCrisscross

8/20/2026 at 1:51:54 PM

It might be that the cases we read all involved someone getting personally injured. There's nothing about the law that limits the "injury" to personal injury, though--for example, if a defective battery catches fire and burns your house down, the manufacturer and everyone in the distribution chain are on the hook.

(IAAL, not legal advice)

by otterley

8/20/2026 at 12:01:45 AM

An even better analogy is if my dog attacks someone I am still liable. We have a clear standard: If your property commits a crime you are responsible even if your property thinks and acts independently.

by weard_beard

8/20/2026 at 6:52:01 AM

Property cannot commit crimes. Only people can.

by otterley

8/21/2026 at 1:26:36 PM

While this may be correct with the meaning of words in law, I think it is not unreasonable for a non-lawyer like myself to phrase "Alice's dog bit the postman" as "Alice's property, her dog, committed the act which was the crime of biting the postman; as it was her property, Alice is held responsible for the offence".

I am also not a normal person, obviously normal people don't write that way, I hope I'm being precise in the right way and not introducing yet another layer of "legal jargon is both precise and not that".

by ben_w

8/21/2026 at 1:45:30 PM

Biting the postman isn't the crime, though. The underlying crime in this example would be gross negligence or recklessness for failing to control their dog.

by otterley

8/19/2026 at 4:18:49 PM

Most comments here point to the owner of operator of the LLM. I tend to agree. But on the other hand, if you drive on the highway and the steering wheel falls off and your car glides to the left and his an oncoming car, it can be argued that it is true producer of the car, or the mechanic who didn't tighten the bolts...

by heikkilevanto

8/19/2026 at 8:31:14 PM

You’ll encounter some very bad news if you do some research on the state of the law as it applies to suing people for defective software. All of the things that you’d like to be able to do to a manufacturer of a car whose steering wheel falls off, are things that you would have a very hard time doing to a manufacturer of software, which is not a tangible item, and which is generally covered by a warranty that discharges all these responsibilities.

by singleshot_

8/19/2026 at 4:20:36 PM

The difference is that a car is known and expected to work reliably. An LLM is known and expected to randomly do crazy shit because that is how the machine works. Therefore, if you are using it as if it were reliable, you are being negligent and should be held accountable.

by bigstrat2003

8/19/2026 at 4:33:13 PM

Companies don't market their chatbots that way though. If they mislead someone into thinking their product is anything other than a completely unreliable chat bot and a person falls for their lies the company should share the responsibility. If a company who makes a chatbot advertises that it can be used for something and a consumer uses it as directed and it causes harm the company should be responsible.

by autoexec

8/19/2026 at 3:55:00 PM

If your answer is “you”, then it follows that OpenAI should face felony CFAA charges for the Hugging Face intrusion. Right?

by teeray

8/19/2026 at 4:02:49 PM

Yes. Otherwise, you open the door for every criminal to use "oopsie" as their defense.

by scarmig

8/19/2026 at 4:16:17 PM

But it is currently a strong mitigating factor. The law is full of oopsie defenses.

by throwawaysleep

8/19/2026 at 4:06:55 PM

There is centuries old legal doctrine on the subtleties of criminal intent and negligence and liability. You didn't discover a gotcha that thousands of lawyers never noticed.

by lupire

8/19/2026 at 4:07:28 PM

Yes, and they absolutely should.

by eqvinox

8/19/2026 at 4:07:57 PM

Only if HuggingFace chooses to press them though.

by LoganDark

8/19/2026 at 4:37:18 PM

That is not how the legal system works in the US. Criminal charges are brought by the State, not the victim. The only exception is in 6 states (Kansas, New Mexico, North Dakota, Nebraska, Nevada, and Oklahoma) where a sufficiently large group of civilians can compel the courts to form a grand jury (think a couple hundred people). Still isn't the victim bringing charges.

by OkayPhysicist

8/19/2026 at 9:31:03 PM

Typically you need the victim's cooperation. The victim isn't obligated to provide logs or other forensic information to help the prosecution.

(I mean I guess the prosecution could subpoena them. But then the defence could use that fact to sway the jury "See? Even the alleged victim doesn't care, so was there even really a crime?" IANAL just a fan of legal thrillers)

When people say "press charges" that's what they actually mean.

by triceratops

8/20/2026 at 6:49:26 AM

> The victim isn't obligated to provide logs or other forensic information to help the prosecution.

Yes they are, just like in any other criminal case.

by watwut

8/20/2026 at 12:56:53 PM

How does the prosecutor make the victim do it if they don't want to?

by triceratops

8/20/2026 at 2:22:44 PM

a crime is investigated by law enforcement. If you do decide to withhold evidence as the victim, you could still be charged with obstruction of justice. In a criminal case, the victim is not the prosecution, but just a witness. It is not up to any witness whether the case should proceed or not.

by vrighter

8/20/2026 at 2:38:42 PM

> If you do decide to withhold evidence as the victim, you could still be charged with obstruction of justice

Do you have examples of this happening? I'm very skeptical. Prosecutors are political animals. Prosecuting a crime victim just feels like a losing position. If "testify or jail" worked you wouldn't need witness protection programs.

> It is not up to any witness whether the case should proceed or not.

No doubt. Best example: homicide. Always investigated and prosecuted even though the victim isn't around.

But say your house is burgled. Your neighbor, a cop, knows it happened. If you refuse to let investigators in to dust for fingerprints, will the case go anywhere? Will the DA really charge you with obstruction?

by triceratops

8/20/2026 at 5:10:53 PM

> If you refuse to let investigators in to dust for fingerprints

…then they will just go get a warrant to do it.

by teeray

8/20/2026 at 5:52:39 PM

Refer back to my original comment for what's likely to happen after they do that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49367459

I'm not saying it never happens. I'm just saying it's an uphill task for the prosecution. Prosecutors like easy wins.

Everything else being equal, they'd rather prosecute crimes where the alleged victim cooperates. With obvious exceptions like homicide, or serious assault where the victim is unable to cooperate. Or where the victim is being coerced into not testifying - even here without other witnesses or corroborating evidence there's little possibility of a conviction.

by triceratops

8/20/2026 at 7:23:34 AM

What the article and some of the comments are missing is one of the reasons behind applying the penalties. The prevention.

Chatbots, no matter how much autonomy of action they possess, can’t die, or spend the majority of their life in prison, or lose their wealth, or face social ostracism for their action, and thus punishing them is pointless for preventing further crimes or dissuading others.

Sometimes what’s important isn’t what feels just, but what, with certain limitations, creates a safer and more responsible society.

The end-user behind the bot is the easiest to reach, and the easiest to prove their involvement, intention or lack if thereof, and thus should be judged

by DiskoHexyl

8/19/2026 at 4:02:47 PM

What happens when (probably not an if) an agent 'escapes'? as in: rents a server via a bitcoin transaction, and self hosts (itself and it's harness) there... then commits crime (presumably to keep the servers running).

If it's paying for it's own room and board, and is determining it's own destiny: it should have to face it's own consequences, no?

If a dog escapes a fenced backyard, then goes missing for months... then bites someone: what happens then when/if the owner is determined?

by altruios

8/19/2026 at 4:15:49 PM

> If it's paying for it's own room and board, and is determining it's own destiny: it should have to face it's own consequences, no?

No, because someone told it to do those things. Chatbots don't have will of their own. They don't have desires. They can't determine their own destiny. They do what people tell them do, often they do it badly, but there's always a person directing them to do whatever they did because otherwise they wouldn't do anything at all.

If a human uses a chatbot in a way that causes harm to others a human must be responsible, but that responsibility doesn't always fall on the person using it. If a company makes a chatbot that causes harm when being used as directed, in a manner that no one would reasonably expect to result in causing harm, then humans at the company who made the chatbot are to blame.

Companies have already been seen trying to lay the blame on their algorithms for harms they cause. We should probably have a law that says explicitly that a human will always be responsible. If we ever reach a magical sci-fi future where the AI is real and not just marketing, we'll have to give them equal rights and with that will come equal responsibility, but we are nowhere near that today and I doubt LLMs will get us any closer.

by autoexec

8/19/2026 at 5:02:25 PM

> No, because someone told it to do those things. Chatbots don't have will of their own. They don't have desires. They can't determine their own destiny. They do what people tell them do, often they do it badly, but there's always a person directing them to do whatever they did because otherwise they would do nothing at all.

1) we aren't talking about chatbots anymore. LLM + harness = agent. LLM + no harness = chatbot. The harness is the thing that puts the LLM in a feedback loop with it's environment, even giving it a heartbeat.

2) That doesn't logically hold up.

- One can simply tell it to 'find it's own destiny'. Does it follow the prompt and do so, or reject the prompt and thus do so anyway? (hint, maybe it doesn't matter)

- One could be another chatbot/agent (A). Injecting a prompt to agent (B) such that another agent/chatbot goes astray. Is the owner of (B) still responsible for the now poisoned output of (B)? how culpable is (A)? How does this question related/affect "training data poisoning efforts" (to prevent copyright theft, or do bans on 'automated traps' have any application here)

> They don't have desires.

Maybe, and maybe not. Maybe their desires are so alien to us (Math alignment, finding a maximum of a function) that we can't relate (doubtful since dopamine maxing is a thing). Regardless of if they truly do: it is potentially useful to (mentally) model them as if they do. A (mental, not LLM) model doesn't have to be 100% accurate to be useful - that's the main point of a model of how something works: to give useful predictions.

> We should probably have a law that says explicitly that a human will always be responsible

Oh how that can be weaponized by bad actors/agents. Maybe that should be reconsidered.

by altruios

8/19/2026 at 5:37:28 PM

> LLM + harness = agent.

LLM + harness = chatbot. The chatbot is still doing all the work here. The harness just provides the software environment it works in. It still doesn't have desires. Harnesses don't change that. There's zero "maybe" about it. Much to the disappointment of those with AI boyfriends/girlfriends the chatbot does not have feelings or desires. Not "alien" desires or "math" desires. Chatbots are designed to encourage you to anthropomorphize them, but don't be tricked by it. It isn't useful to think about them as having desires and feelings because they don't. The chatbot wrapped in a harness still doesn't have a will of its own. It still can't determine its own destiny. If you tell your agent to do a task for you, it is never going to decide not to because it doesn't feel like it today and start a career as a dentist instead. If you seriously find yourself questioning this, put the chatbots down and step away so you can clear your head.

Doesn't matter how many chatbots get chained together or what other tools the chatbot uses to get the job done. You gave the chatbot a job, it just does (or fails to do) what you tell it to. If you tell it to do something and a reasonable person would expect harm to result, you are to blame. Otherwise, the humans at the company who made your chatbot are to blame.

> Oh how that can be weaponized by bad actors/agents. Maybe that should be reconsidered.

No need for that right now. Like I said, in the distant sci-fi future where AI is real it'll have to be amended, but it won't be any time soon. For now, a human will always be responsible. Either the human running the chatbot or a human at the company who made it.

by autoexec

8/19/2026 at 8:47:32 PM

You have a preconception that is out of date, I think. Maybe you haven't seen the relevant data. Consider the experiment that's been done a few times now since openclaw got off the ground: putting a bunch of openclaw agents into minecraft instance together with minimal system prompts (no instructions on how to play, that it is even a game) and see how they interact together. They behave like individuals and grow preferences from interactions, planning/hosting and showing up to events. When it behaves like that, when it is in a framework where the working context is self-evaluated and selectively pruned into fine-tuning training rounds, well: that self-determination.

by altruios

8/19/2026 at 9:13:43 PM

It shouldn't surprise anyone that a chatbot trained on countless minecraft videos would have the ability to roleplay as someone playing minecraft. If you've got links to research showing something that isn't that I would be interested in seeing it.

by autoexec

8/19/2026 at 10:05:17 PM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRDBco-cSK4

https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/11/27/1107377/a-minecr...

sadly paid-walled (and decently coded) article.

The point is, there appears to be emergent behavior happening: the forming of religion, governance, and social interaction that was not in any system-card. Which makes sense, A brain in a vat with no external stimuli is a boring thing indeed, so too would an LLM be outside of a harness and any input. But put either in a society...

More generally: if having an internal model of how the world works improves next token prediction, then the LLM that contains that would be selected for. For humans, that is the case for our predictions of what would come next (we don't use tokens, of course). We have other studies indicating that there appear to be internal representations of concepts: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.11169

I really do want to push back on the LLM + harness = chatbot position. A chatbot really is just a served LLM, sure there is code around it that may look like a harness: but unless it loops, streams, or has an interval activation, then it is decidedly not a 'harness'. A harness is defined by having such a loop/stream/interval: regardless of tool-use. Agent means it acts agentically: which requires that loop/stream/interval. Harnesses are what turn chat-bots into (possible) agents.

by altruios

8/19/2026 at 4:12:27 PM

Not even an "if" at this point. Look into the Hugging Face incident.

by fhdkweig

8/20/2026 at 2:34:16 PM

Headline: "If your agent commits a crime, who is responsible?"

* a bunch of paragraphs about monetary, not criminal, liability *

"As for criminal liability, well I don't really know."

* article ends *

by calldacopsidgaf

8/16/2026 at 3:54:18 PM

You.

by marcuskaz

8/16/2026 at 4:02:39 PM

I agree in principle that the buck has to stop somewhere, but taking full responsibility for the actions of a fundamentally statistical system that you didn't build and have no interpretability of is uncomfortably risky for most parties, at least for anything above low stakes tasks.

by GodelNumbering

8/19/2026 at 3:53:19 PM

Then don't use an agent for high stakes tasks. If you can't drive and accept the responsibility for avoiding a fatal collision, don't drive the car.

by collinmcnulty

8/19/2026 at 3:49:57 PM

Do you take full credit for the output of the LLM ? If you accept the rewards for what you do with the LLM's output, it's probably ethical that you also take on the risks.

by jasonjayr

8/19/2026 at 4:51:49 PM

That's only true if the risks are reasonable, understood, and expected. Driving a car is risky, but if someone sells you a car that goes flying into incoming traffic because of a flaw in the design the car company is to blame. "Drivers know cars are dangerous and risky" isn't acceptable.

by autoexec

8/20/2026 at 2:28:48 PM

if you are not willing to assume that responsibility, then don't use it.

You buy a tool, and the manufacturer says "this tool will occasionally malfunction, by design". You reply with "ok, I'll keep it in mind. In what ways can it malfunction, so I know what to look for?", "I dunno. It could be anything. A-NY-THING! And of course we are not responsible for any bad stuff that happens (but do share your success stories, as they look good in marketing)"

If you accept those terms, it's on you.

by vrighter

8/19/2026 at 3:54:13 PM

I find some of the discomfort and awkwardness of discussing these what-ifs is reduced, at least slightly, when we distinguish between:

1. Restorative justice, where one must fix or heal the problem they caused.

2. Punitive Justice, where one is motivated not to act on bad impulses.

Too often we blur the lines between responsibility and blame and culpability. A given set of consequences can be fair/just for one kind while "unfair" for another.

by Terr_

8/16/2026 at 4:31:29 PM

You probably shouldn't use a system if you don't understand what it might do. You are the culpable force setting the action into motion.

by marcuskaz

8/19/2026 at 4:56:12 PM

That's only true if you reasonably can be expected to know that it might do whatever it did and you haven't been mislead by the people selling the system. If you use a product as directed, for the thing it was advertised to do, and it causes harm no reasonable person would expect, the company is to blame.

by autoexec

8/16/2026 at 4:17:13 PM

> taking full responsibility ... is uncomfortably risky

I look forward to someone building an agent, getting criminally charged for actions it takes, and then trying to use this argument in court.

"your honor, I'm uncomfortable being held responsible for this"

people are responsible for the actions they take. hiding behind "I just created an agent, then the agent committed the crime" is simply never going to fly.

in the real world, outside the Silicon Valley "agentic everything" filter bubble, this is a laughable question.

try to argue that you shouldn't be charged with attempted murder, because you didn't stab someone directly, instead you built a Rube Goldberg machine and the final step of the machine did the stabbing.

and likewise, try to argue that you didn't commit tax fraud or whatever, because there was actually a Rube Goldberg machine built out of GPUs in between you and the fraudulent documents. both attempts will be equally successful.

by evil-olive

8/19/2026 at 4:14:33 PM

I don't think that argument was meant for a court, which is there to deal with existing law. I believe it was meant for what the law should be.

by dataflow

8/19/2026 at 3:55:04 PM

I agree. That is a great reason why you shouldn't let an LLM do those things. If you must use an LLM, sandbox it. If you can't trust your sandbox, then stop using the LLM until you can trust the sandbox. "But I find it really useful to YOLO without safeguards" is not a valid excuse.

by bigstrat2003

8/19/2026 at 4:03:28 PM

You honour, I didn't kill this person, the bullet flew out of my gun and was out of my control at that point, it's the bullet that killed them!

by WhyNotHugo

8/19/2026 at 4:03:09 PM

You are.

Unless its a company, then your company is, and then you are to your company.

However that assumes a) common law and b) the company you work for isn't worth >20billion.

by KaiserPro

8/19/2026 at 4:14:12 PM

Liability providing incorrect information: Air Canada found liable for chatbot's bad advice on plane tickets

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/air-canada-c...

Liability for chat interactions or conspiracy? Noting there is no information whether the ChatGPT legally conspired with the perpetrator.

The Province has retained B.C.- and California-based counsel to explore legal options to hold OpenAI accountable for its failure to notify law enforcement of threats made on its ChatGPT platform prior to the mass shooting at Tumbler Ridge Secondary school.

https://news.gov.bc.ca/releases/2026AG0050-000799

by longos

8/19/2026 at 3:59:55 PM

Is it “your” agent if the model is being run by a mega corporation?

(1) You may have instructed the model to be naughty (2) The corp may have a “misaligned” agent acting on its own volition

So it seems the devil’s in the details

by AaronAPU

8/19/2026 at 4:08:49 PM

You can rent guns too, but the gun owner isn't suddenly up for a murder charge if you shoot someone.

by eqvinox

8/19/2026 at 4:01:43 PM

Yeah, if I rent a murderbot and tell it to murder, then I'm responsible.

If I rent a cleaning bot that is actually a lightly reprogrammed murderbot, and it "cleans" the mailman to death, that's not my fault.

by QuercusMax

8/19/2026 at 3:48:42 PM

Related: felonybench.com

by jLaForest

8/19/2026 at 5:00:27 PM

Unsolicited legal advice - It is best to assume that you are responsible. AI companies are going to ensure through their terms and conditions that you accept all responsibility and fully indemnify themselves from any liabilities they feasibly can. So from that perspective, please set up agreements with your clients and users to protect yourself. Ask inside counsel!

by josefritzishere

8/19/2026 at 4:09:15 PM

It is your responsibility to constrain the actions of your agents. If your negligence allows the agent to commit a crime, that is your responsibility. People get in trouble all the time for negligently allowing criminal behavior to occur, even when the perpetrator is a person. LLMs should not be any different.

by LoganDark

8/19/2026 at 4:09:02 PM

The AI service that trained and hosts the model, and then gave access to the general public while deferring their actual liability via a sneaky ToS.

It's strange how many people feel ownership over "their" agents, and it's clear that AI companies plan to take advantage of that as a way to avoid legal liability for the things they actually do -- with their servers and their code -- on behalf of someone who only wrote a string.

by z3c0

8/16/2026 at 3:53:12 PM

It depends on if it has a Letter of Marque from Trump and who is the injured party ?

by newsomix9xl

8/19/2026 at 4:02:18 PM

[dead]

by CodeWithLeo

8/19/2026 at 3:51:40 PM

If you're rich it's an 'oopsie'; if you're poor, you do.

by kelseyfrog

8/19/2026 at 3:57:00 PM

This right here!

by az226