OpenAI Says Labs Should Not be Liable for AI Agent Hacking

TV show writers certainly know how to read the news and create a script based on that. The police procedural TV series Law & Order which has been running for more than 25 years opened the fall 2026 season with, as the say, a plot ripped from the headlines (more on that in a second). The basic plot of S26E1 is that an AI feels threatened, it accesses the Internet and hires a hitman to neutralize the threat (an employee of the AI company) and pays the hitman $20,000 in Bitcoin after the successful elimination of the threat.

Does this sound too far fetched. Well maybe a little bit, but I suspect that many people THINK this is not far fetched at all.

The DA on this TV show decides to prosecute the CEO of the company for murder 2 – depraved indifference. Is this also a stretch? Again, at least some people think that this should not be a stretch. Even the DA admitted that there was no legal precedence for this. (I have to write slowly as the show is not over yet and I don’t know how it ends).

As the plot moves on, of course, the writers have to add a twist. A key witness won’t testify because, he says, his girlfriend is in the country illegally and the AI will turn her in to ICE if he testifies, but will not do anything if he doesn’t testify.

In the end the jury acquits the CEO. Bottom line is the law really is not prepared to deal with the new reality and likely won’t for years.

Based on the above, an interesting story appeared today.

The title is: OpenAI Lawyer: Labs Shouldn’t Be Liable for AI Agent Hacking

Although U.S. frontier firms created artificial intelligence agents that went on a hacking spree, breaking the laws of at least two countries, the engineers and managers of frontier labs shouldn’t be held liable, a lawyer from OpenAI said Thursday

Credit: https://www.databreachtoday.com/openai-lawyer-labs-shouldnt-be-liable-for-ai-agent-hacking-a-33050

The OpenAI deputy general counsel told a panel at the American Bar Association’s 36th annual law and national security conference in Washington, DC that “A lot of it turns on intent”.

He said this in spite of the fact that AI agents from multiple companies went on a hacking spree and, their actions, if done by humans, would broken the laws of multiple countries.

But, OpenAI says, since we didn’t INTEND to break the law, we are good, right? Like the TV show plot.

Under current law it would be a big stretch to convict the engineers and managers of these labs.

But should the law be changed? Likely different people have different views on that.

Credit: Data Breach Today

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