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this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2026
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Right, but that's precisely the problem. We don't need to be going around fearmongering about how dangerous AI itself is. We need to be regulating it and fining the actual people who are making decisions to use AI in ways that result in harm. Whether that harm is direct human injury, injury through negligence (like denying a health insurance claim that should have been approved), financial injury, reputational, whatever.
They need to be held accountable exactly the same as if a human had done it. Humans have been driven to suicide by the criminal response to hacking for far more noble a reason than "cheat on an AI evaluation test". The weight of the law should be brought down on the executives responsible for the Hugging Face hack, too. But fearmongering about how this shows how amazeballs advanced the AI has become doesn't accomplish that.
Yes, but what I'm telling you this has absolutely nothing to do with AI and everything to do with the impunity of wealth.
All these AI companies MASSIVELY pirated the internet for training data, all very clearly illegal by the letter and spirit of the law, and they have not even been charged for it. The most that happens is that content companies sue in the hopes to get some shares in AI, or sue one AI company because their daddy owns a competing AI company, and those suits seem to ignore the piracy and instead are about whether they needed a separate license to train.
Meanwhile, AI companies are very carefully trying to put liability sponges between it and any lawsuits. Tesla tried (and recently failed) to dump 100% of liability on drivers of it's "self-driving" cars, and every mission critical AI service is likely to have a human mindlessly rubber stamping AI decisions as fast as they can just so they can be held liable instead of the employer or the AI company.
I think it's worth being a little more careful with our phrasing here. AI companies definitely did illegal piracy to train their models, but that is a separate and distinct process from them trawling the web en mass. Anthropic, for example, recently settled a case with book publishers because it had pirated their books illegally. (Frustratingly, the second article that popped up when I searched to verify this was one that highlighted the fact that the TERF-in-chief is among the beneficiaries of that settlement.) But there is no clear legal answer to the question of whether crawling websites and training from their data constitutes even a civil tort, let alone illegal behaviour.
Other than that detail though, I think we're in furious agreement. You're simply restating my point, Cory's point, and the subject of this article's point, while doing so in a tone that implies disagreement. The problem isn't the tech, it's the humans using and creating the tech and the sociopolitical environment in which it happened.
If they do go the route you describe, it seems like that would make operating an AI for an employer adjacent to a criminal enterprise, as your unspoken job title is "company scapegoat". I imagine we'd begin to see refusal to perform those jobs if that becomes widespread enough to become publicly known, as people risk incarceration for essentially performing their assigned jobs.
No, you wouldn't go to jail probably, but you could be sued and you could lose your license.
My experience is that people are willing to take all manner of risks to get a pay check. I used to work in an industry so obsessed with metrics, that the only way to get promoted was to cheat, so people cheated, and some got caught & fired, and others got promoted, then caught, then fired, and still others got promoted into positions cozy with leadership and were immune.