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FTC chair suggests AI developers should be liable for conduct of agents
(www.reuters.com)
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this post was submitted on 27 Sep 2026
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This is the first sensible proposal for regulating AI that I have ever heard. Make the chucklefucks who are unleashing this horror directly responsible for their bullshit.
Chat GPT hacks a government website? 5 years in jail for Altman. Claude agent deletes someone's database? Amodei gets the bill to fix it.
All AI bullshit stops over night.
Unfortunately the Corporate Veil exists in the US (and most other) legal systems. I personally believe that this is a major root for all of the bullshit we have to deal with on a daily basis. You kill someone, you go to prison. A company has shitty safety intentionally to save money and someone dies, nobody sees prison. CEOs always say they deserve the money because they take the risk... Let's make that very true.
The entire board should be held accountable and share the punishments, otherwise they still have their fall guy.
This isn't even regulation. The floor is not being distracted by morons shouting "it's alive!" whilst robbing you and pointing to a computer. "Arrest that computer officer! It did all the bad things!"
Or its just another way for the government to prosecute you and strip you of your resources. I'm SURE that no one will be unjustly punished over something their AI did.
This causes a nationwide depression in the US which probably infects the world. Also criminal liability doesn't normally attach to unintended wrongs AND we don't normally make CEOs directly responsible for all possible wrongs committed by any one of potentially hundreds of thousands of employees because that would be ... nonsense.
For every complex problem there is a simple stupid and wrong solution.
Honestly, I have thought long and hard about how to handle the situation where a company commits crimes as a result of their decisions and how to remove the concept of the corporate veil in a way that provides just protections.
Essentially there would need to be an affirmative defense wherein the board and executives must admit to the wrongdoing, but prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the actions were taken by employees with malicious intent against the corporate leadership, either as a whole or against a subset. This means it cannot be weaponized to take out a boss you don't like, but also it makes it very hard to get out of someone being held criminally liable.
Those are the models. An agent is a harness around the model.
So if this goes through I could use opencode with GPT and... Which one is at fault, Opencode or OpenAI? What if I also modify Opencode's system prompt as a joke to make it as unhelpful as possible and forget I did it, am I at fault or is it still Altman who goes to jail if I now let it delete my production database?
As I understand it, it's the person running it, so if you let an agent fuck something up, YOU are at fault, not the developer of the model or the tool. You're the one who gave the task. You have the ability to block harmful commands if you don't go yolo mode and actually read what it's doing.
i think both the developer using the agent should be liable for deliberate misuse, but the company that provides a dangerous model with broken guard rails should also be liable.
Everyone in the situation that is supplying that hardware is a good start or baseline.