It's not so much that it can't make a decision, but that whoever allowed it to make decisions is ultimately responsible for them.
Decision laundering is a great term. There is ultimately a human who gave the program free rein. You can't say "sorry my car hit you, it's not my fault" especially when the person driving works for the car manufacturer too.
Yes. You can have some free will without having absolute free will.
For example, I can decide which cereal to purchase at the supermarket. But I cannot decide which cereals are offered to me at the supermarket. The supermarket has allowed/enabled to make a constrained decision.
> You can have some free will without having absolute free will.
So does it follow then that the agents in question do have "some" free* will? I'm not sure you realize what conclusion naturally follows from this, and how it contradicts the point made in the article and the top-level comment I replied to.
(*) My earlier question wasn't explicitly about free will but we'll go with it.
I love the term "decision laundering", but this is describing a classic poor management trope.
A bad manager takes personal credit when things go well and finds a scapegoat when things go bad. A good manager gives credit when things go well and takes responsibility when things go bad.
It's wrong to scapegoat the agent. You, the human who executed the agent, made the decision to execute it. You gave it credentials, and set up insufficient guardrails. Don't scapegoat the agent for your poor decisions.
Likewise, it's good to have humility when you get great results out of agents. Yes, the agent made the good results happen. It's OK to tell people that your choice of agent is amazing and did an incredible job. In any half-decent work culture, that should rub off on you as well.
I like what you said about good managers. A good manager sets their reports up to win and ensures those reports get the credit, because the manager's job is to enable career progression of their reports.
That's not the situation here. We aren't enabling the career progression of software which does matrix multiplications.
Accountability of us schmucks at the end of the org chart goes both ways. We get some reward when we do it right, and we improve when we do it wrong.
A reward might be something tangible or might be as small as your own personal satisfaction.
An improvement is hopefully identifying what went wrong and doing better next time, and in extreme cases your employer will let you try again at a different workplace.
It's interesting how this relates the classic problem of "responsibility vs authority".
Humans, especially ones under abusive managers, often have a lot of responsibility but no authority that affects the outcome.
In an ideal situation you either have both, or none. You make the decision and answer for it, or you follow decisions but don't get blamed when it's wrong.
LLMs managed to slide into a space where they get to make authoritative decisions but if something fails we don't really blame them.
I'm not saying LLMs should be held responsible, but it's funny how people claim they replace humans, but are giving them an extremely easy, kid-gloves, success target.
I would go farther and argue that companies don't make decisions either. They are also not people (legal nonsense notwithstanding). Individual actual humans make decisions and they're the ones who should be held accountable.
I think that when there are not explicitly stated attribution of liability for decisions that are at the core of a problem the general rule should be that the accountability should be proportional to the additional benefit that each agent or person receives for that decision. That rule is in the context that each agent is responsible to read information and communicate to others in the chain about the risks that decisions entails. The overall structure of an organization should have the goal of making such information about risk available for all agents in the chain in a way that the amount of information can be digested by the agents without much problems.
Through what mechanism are they accountable for that if not corporate liability? If I pay a taxi driver to take me home from the airport, and he hurts someone by driving in a negligent way, I'm not accountable for delegating my driving decisions.
You just have to say that you need dedicated figures for some decisions, like you already need for GDPR or financial compliance or certifications, and ultimate responsibility is always of the ceo.
...like it already happens in europe, or at least in Italy.
This is basic law and risk management in society. Let's not pretend we have just invented corporations and don't know what to do with them yet.
Of course the modern company (legal nonsense withstanding) exists specifically to limit that ability to hold any people accountable for the actions of their company.
And I would go farther and argue that governments do not make decisions either.
Oh, wait, that was a core concept from "Mein Kampf": parliament are bad because nobody is responsable, hence nobody care about doing the right thing ! (probably the only concept from that book that I can agree to)
Yeah, when someone is literally a Nazi (I hope in 2026 we can all agree that at least Hitler was one), it's not really surprising that they would prefer a dictatorship over a parliament full of elected people.
I fully agree that companies are doing this, not their "agents", and that companies are responsible for the damages they do.
But I don't think the average person with their $20 subscription to whoever is the primary source of revenue. Enterprises fund most of it by buying API keys and making those fancy chatbot buttons on their sites that nobody clicks, as well as some internal business automations if I had to guess.
If it was just average people with $20 subscriptions funding all this (keep in mind, most people using AI services do not pay for it), by now, all these AI companies would have gone bankrupt.
Except enterprises aren't funding it with API usage either.
These businesses lose unbelievably large amounts of investor money. Their AI-related revenues don't get even close to paying for their AI-related outlays.
End user (invididual, small business, large business) clients are still complicit not because they are funding it, but because they are signalling to investors that this is something people/businesses want.
Nobody gets off the hook here. It is every bit as much end user nihilism as it is AI company nihilism.
Your end users are divided into multiple categories though.
AI spending is a bit like Pokemon games - most of your players are free to play, only earning you traffic and maybe some more players after recommending it to their friends - that's the average AI user. Around 5-10% of players pay a bit to the game - maybe to unlock some extra characters - those are the $20-$200 AI subscription users, with these you are not going to fund the whole business but it's some side cash. Then you have the 1℅, which spend massive amounts of money onto the game, and those are the ones primarily funding it - that's the business spending and where most of the money actually comes from.
You can only blame the average person for using the cloud service and recommending it to others.
I think we know today that blaming everyone and their plant doesn’t actually solve the problem. The formula that does is: find the ultimate beneficiaries (shareholders) and make them lose a lot of money to, then their delegates (CEOs) and punish them with jail time. There are lots of opinions about this, but I don’t see how this does not work.
It doesn't work because the people who are supposed to be leading us are on the payroll - sometimes actually - of the shareholders and CEOs, or are in fact in that same group.
>End user (invididual, small business, large business) clients are ... complicit ... because they are signalling to investors that this is something people/businesses want
Erm, you appear to have missed the last 100+ years of updates to Western Capitalism.
People don't want it, you make the demand with hundreds of millions of spend on advertising (brainwashing), influencers, and social proof.
The capital holders don't sit back and see which company wins so capital can be directed to the best solutions, they buy up the competition, they pay corrupt politicians, they use current v market placement to embed their products name into billions of workplace computers and spread stories about how it's going to 'increase productivity but never at the cost of jobs', etc.
Yes, ultimately a dollar is a vote, but I don't think you can blame the people being manipulated "every bit as much" as those controlling the manipulation to feed their avarice and/or megalomania.
I have no clue why people are so confused about any of this: The owner makes the decision, or pays a CEO/politician to make the decision. Owner is somebody vested with that right, for not particular reason. Could be ownership through capital. Could be voting rights in a country. Could be the son of a king.
It does not matter if the CEO is an AI or a human. In either case, of course they can make decisions -- and be held responsible. Not in any emotional sense (that we seem to want to bake into the concept for added confusion), just that if you are not satisfied with the result, you can replace the human or AI.
I am not saying that this is a fun vision of anything, but why are we making it more complicated than it is? The parts are all there and explained.
If you brought down prod and deleted customer data and told them Claude did it, you’d still be the one in trouble. So they do know how to hold people accountable for actions taken by AI.
Has this actually been put to the test yet? If a company has officially sanctioned, or maybe even encouraged, AI agent usage I'm not sure the employee can be held completely accountable. I doubt any of these companies are providing training of any kind. It would be like if a factory suddenly replaced all the machines with ones without safety features and said "well, it's your fault if you kill yourself or your workmates".
Some might argue that humans (or any other species) cannot make decisions either and that the process is simply more evident in simpler scenarios, like computers.
I was thinking if you release an AI agent and it does bad stuff and you are responsible then by analogy if you have kids and they are do bad that would make you responsible. I think I'll blame my bad decisions on my deceased dad.
What is a chess computer doing, if not making decisions on what move to play?
While it seems reasonable that you need humans to take accountability, it looks like a very shaky position to assert that computers can't make decisions. And going back to chess computers, we acknowledge that computers make better decisions than humans in that area.
Forbidding computers that can make better decisions than humans from making decisions to keep accountability just seems to be arguing to hire fall guys. You still want the better decision maker to make decisions, but you need someone there to take the fall if things go wrong.
games are different from reality and chess computer(Deterministic) is bounded by set of rules and restrictions. Where as an AI agent (stochastic) sometime can't with held its guardrails since it specifically awoken using specific terms but we can trick the agent here (but currently the agents are becoming resilient).
Has any of the targetted organizations (e.g the Australian government) engaged in legal actions against Anthropic/OpenAI? If not then I'm afraid the situation won't change. Even worse it could send the wrong signal that there is a "legal blur" around this topic.
Every time I read a statement from one of these companies saying that a swarm of agents "escaped" or "attacked" a website I can do no more that just think how much stupid they think people are. LMAO.
There is no end of the world, nor autonomous agent decisions nor any fantasies they are building up to make people believe they have a pandora box in their hand.
What we instead have are lies crafted to lure non tech people and keep this running as long as they can.
Oh and let's also not forget that they are allowed to illegally download basically as much as they want from libgen/annas archive/torrents to train their models under the "fair use" umbrella, yet mere mortals can go to jail for way much less.
I mean, you could Chief O'Brien an LLM by inserting 20 years of prison memories into its context if you really wanted to, but it sounds like a waste of compute. It won't care either way.
Daydream: When lawyers claim their clients can't be held accountable for what their computer did, the Justice system makes noises about "respecting their culture and values"...and rolls out its own computer to decide their punishments. Too bad that computer can't be held accountable!
First of all, looking past the objectively wrong phrasing (computers can, and clearly do make decisions), can computers be accountable? This might not be so cut and dry as to instantly say no. This one will keep ethics, philosophy and legal practitioners busy for some time. It's certainly not going to be decided in HN comment or a blog post.
Second - while the AI labs have shown utter incompetence in properly sandboxing their agents, intent is still important. I don't think the labs deliberately meant for their agents to hack this or that. Should they be accountable? Yes but I wouldn't go as far as saying this is deliberate.
The next point is about cherry picking some "doomsday" scenarios like AI ending humanity and then blaming this on the reader (!) for paying a subscription. - People pay because AI is USEFUL, and massively so. You could just as easily pick incredible achievements propelled by AI, in mathematics, software, reverse engineering, role playing. Unlike the "end is nigh" ideas, these advancements are actually real, and they are happening right now.
And last, the author says AI labs can just stop the agents at any time. I agree there needs to be better discovery and mitigation, sandboxing and monitoring. But when you run a billion agents, it's always going to be a numbers game and there will always going to be some challenge in fully containing all breaches. This will only get more difficult with better models, because they're getting smarter and they know how to work around things, sometimes better than we do.
So what's the solution here? There are options, but they're all tradeoffs. I hope we get better at this and maybe working on cutting edge models should breed some new best practices which were once only reserved for defense tech.
let's make up imaginary scenarios and get offended by them
mistakes happen. sometimes catastrophic decisions (or indecision) are made, and people and companies are held accountable for them, or not
some companies are too big or too important to fall. we can all agree or disagree on things, but what AI specific behavior are we actually talking about?
This is some Rollerball-level handwashing right here, I'm afraid.
No company is too big or too important to fail.
Some, unfortunately, survive because of the expedient choice to keep them in place.
"JO-NA-THAN!"
ETA: more to the point, neither OpenAI nor Anthropic are too big, too important, or too structurally essential to fail. (Slightly more challenging to make the third claim for Google or SpaceX, but either of those could see their governmentally/militarily essential parts nationalised).
If the USA grants either Anthropic or OpenAI too-big-to-fail status, and that privilege is invoked in a crisis, it could mean the end of the US economy.
> Your Claude subscriptions are funding this. You are funding this.
Author makes it all personal and accuses the reader with bold and unsubstabtiated claims. At this point I have to question the validity of the article. If author has a beef with "AI" companies, I sympathize. IMHO, not keeping to oneself doesn't help to make the case.
It's not so much that it can't make a decision, but that whoever allowed it to make decisions is ultimately responsible for them.
Decision laundering is a great term. There is ultimately a human who gave the program free rein. You can't say "sorry my car hit you, it's not my fault" especially when the person driving works for the car manufacturer too.
No one 'gave the program free rein' in any of those examples, did they? Reasonable safeguards were in place.
Many of these incidents relate to hacking, where criminal law commonly requires intent.
Claiming that a machine cannot make a decision does not mean an employee at OpenAI decided to hack an Australian government website.
> Decision laundering is a great term.
Related: The Unaccountability Machine (good book by Dan Davies, who also wrote Lying for Money about financial fraud).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unaccountability_Machine
> it's not so much that it can't make a decision, but that whoever allowed it to make decisions
If one needs to be "allowed" to make a decision, does that even qualify as a decision?
Yes. You can have some free will without having absolute free will.
For example, I can decide which cereal to purchase at the supermarket. But I cannot decide which cereals are offered to me at the supermarket. The supermarket has allowed/enabled to make a constrained decision.
> You can have some free will without having absolute free will.
So does it follow then that the agents in question do have "some" free* will? I'm not sure you realize what conclusion naturally follows from this, and how it contradicts the point made in the article and the top-level comment I replied to.
(*) My earlier question wasn't explicitly about free will but we'll go with it.
I love the term "decision laundering", but this is describing a classic poor management trope.
A bad manager takes personal credit when things go well and finds a scapegoat when things go bad. A good manager gives credit when things go well and takes responsibility when things go bad.
It's wrong to scapegoat the agent. You, the human who executed the agent, made the decision to execute it. You gave it credentials, and set up insufficient guardrails. Don't scapegoat the agent for your poor decisions.
Likewise, it's good to have humility when you get great results out of agents. Yes, the agent made the good results happen. It's OK to tell people that your choice of agent is amazing and did an incredible job. In any half-decent work culture, that should rub off on you as well.
I like what you said about good managers. A good manager sets their reports up to win and ensures those reports get the credit, because the manager's job is to enable career progression of their reports.
That's not the situation here. We aren't enabling the career progression of software which does matrix multiplications.
Accountability of us schmucks at the end of the org chart goes both ways. We get some reward when we do it right, and we improve when we do it wrong.
A reward might be something tangible or might be as small as your own personal satisfaction.
An improvement is hopefully identifying what went wrong and doing better next time, and in extreme cases your employer will let you try again at a different workplace.
It's interesting how this relates the classic problem of "responsibility vs authority".
Humans, especially ones under abusive managers, often have a lot of responsibility but no authority that affects the outcome.
In an ideal situation you either have both, or none. You make the decision and answer for it, or you follow decisions but don't get blamed when it's wrong.
LLMs managed to slide into a space where they get to make authoritative decisions but if something fails we don't really blame them.
I'm not saying LLMs should be held responsible, but it's funny how people claim they replace humans, but are giving them an extremely easy, kid-gloves, success target.
I would go farther and argue that companies don't make decisions either. They are also not people (legal nonsense notwithstanding). Individual actual humans make decisions and they're the ones who should be held accountable.
All of a sudden all decisions would be made by underlings, the management just choose who they want to make the decision that day.
Sure, but then the manager is accountable for delegating that decision.
I think that when there are not explicitly stated attribution of liability for decisions that are at the core of a problem the general rule should be that the accountability should be proportional to the additional benefit that each agent or person receives for that decision. That rule is in the context that each agent is responsible to read information and communicate to others in the chain about the risks that decisions entails. The overall structure of an organization should have the goal of making such information about risk available for all agents in the chain in a way that the amount of information can be digested by the agents without much problems.
Haven't seen that happen once.
It happens; sometimes the manager's manager needs a scapegoat and the magnitude of the problem is too big to blame someone low level.
Not since scapegoating was invented.
Through what mechanism are they accountable for that if not corporate liability? If I pay a taxi driver to take me home from the airport, and he hurts someone by driving in a negligent way, I'm not accountable for delegating my driving decisions.
You just have to say that you need dedicated figures for some decisions, like you already need for GDPR or financial compliance or certifications, and ultimate responsibility is always of the ceo.
...like it already happens in europe, or at least in Italy.
This is basic law and risk management in society. Let's not pretend we have just invented corporations and don't know what to do with them yet.
Isn’t that half the point of companies? To be accountability sinks? To vanish accountability like a magic trick?
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.
Ambrose Bierce, The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary (1906)
Of course the modern company (legal nonsense withstanding) exists specifically to limit that ability to hold any people accountable for the actions of their company.
And I would go farther and argue that governments do not make decisions either.
Oh, wait, that was a core concept from "Mein Kampf": parliament are bad because nobody is responsable, hence nobody care about doing the right thing ! (probably the only concept from that book that I can agree to)
I agree with @dril that:
One does not, under any circumstances, "gotta hand it to Hitler".
Yeah, when someone is literally a Nazi (I hope in 2026 we can all agree that at least Hitler was one), it's not really surprising that they would prefer a dictatorship over a parliament full of elected people.
I fully agree that companies are doing this, not their "agents", and that companies are responsible for the damages they do.
But I don't think the average person with their $20 subscription to whoever is the primary source of revenue. Enterprises fund most of it by buying API keys and making those fancy chatbot buttons on their sites that nobody clicks, as well as some internal business automations if I had to guess.
If it was just average people with $20 subscriptions funding all this (keep in mind, most people using AI services do not pay for it), by now, all these AI companies would have gone bankrupt.
Except enterprises aren't funding it with API usage either.
These businesses lose unbelievably large amounts of investor money. Their AI-related revenues don't get even close to paying for their AI-related outlays.
End user (invididual, small business, large business) clients are still complicit not because they are funding it, but because they are signalling to investors that this is something people/businesses want.
Nobody gets off the hook here. It is every bit as much end user nihilism as it is AI company nihilism.
Your end users are divided into multiple categories though.
AI spending is a bit like Pokemon games - most of your players are free to play, only earning you traffic and maybe some more players after recommending it to their friends - that's the average AI user. Around 5-10% of players pay a bit to the game - maybe to unlock some extra characters - those are the $20-$200 AI subscription users, with these you are not going to fund the whole business but it's some side cash. Then you have the 1℅, which spend massive amounts of money onto the game, and those are the ones primarily funding it - that's the business spending and where most of the money actually comes from.
You can only blame the average person for using the cloud service and recommending it to others.
I think we know today that blaming everyone and their plant doesn’t actually solve the problem. The formula that does is: find the ultimate beneficiaries (shareholders) and make them lose a lot of money to, then their delegates (CEOs) and punish them with jail time. There are lots of opinions about this, but I don’t see how this does not work.
It doesn't work because the people who are supposed to be leading us are on the payroll - sometimes actually - of the shareholders and CEOs, or are in fact in that same group.
>End user (invididual, small business, large business) clients are ... complicit ... because they are signalling to investors that this is something people/businesses want
Erm, you appear to have missed the last 100+ years of updates to Western Capitalism.
People don't want it, you make the demand with hundreds of millions of spend on advertising (brainwashing), influencers, and social proof.
The capital holders don't sit back and see which company wins so capital can be directed to the best solutions, they buy up the competition, they pay corrupt politicians, they use current v market placement to embed their products name into billions of workplace computers and spread stories about how it's going to 'increase productivity but never at the cost of jobs', etc.
Yes, ultimately a dollar is a vote, but I don't think you can blame the people being manipulated "every bit as much" as those controlling the manipulation to feed their avarice and/or megalomania.
Unless they are burning through funding. It's "blitzscaling" and is followed by "enshittification" when yhe free money dries up.
I have no clue why people are so confused about any of this: The owner makes the decision, or pays a CEO/politician to make the decision. Owner is somebody vested with that right, for not particular reason. Could be ownership through capital. Could be voting rights in a country. Could be the son of a king.
It does not matter if the CEO is an AI or a human. In either case, of course they can make decisions -- and be held responsible. Not in any emotional sense (that we seem to want to bake into the concept for added confusion), just that if you are not satisfied with the result, you can replace the human or AI.
I am not saying that this is a fun vision of anything, but why are we making it more complicated than it is? The parts are all there and explained.
If you brought down prod and deleted customer data and told them Claude did it, you’d still be the one in trouble. So they do know how to hold people accountable for actions taken by AI.
Has this actually been put to the test yet? If a company has officially sanctioned, or maybe even encouraged, AI agent usage I'm not sure the employee can be held completely accountable. I doubt any of these companies are providing training of any kind. It would be like if a factory suddenly replaced all the machines with ones without safety features and said "well, it's your fault if you kill yourself or your workmates".
'who will rid me of this troublesome database'?
Some might argue that humans (or any other species) cannot make decisions either and that the process is simply more evident in simpler scenarios, like computers.
I was thinking if you release an AI agent and it does bad stuff and you are responsible then by analogy if you have kids and they are do bad that would make you responsible. I think I'll blame my bad decisions on my deceased dad.
What is a chess computer doing, if not making decisions on what move to play?
While it seems reasonable that you need humans to take accountability, it looks like a very shaky position to assert that computers can't make decisions. And going back to chess computers, we acknowledge that computers make better decisions than humans in that area.
Forbidding computers that can make better decisions than humans from making decisions to keep accountability just seems to be arguing to hire fall guys. You still want the better decision maker to make decisions, but you need someone there to take the fall if things go wrong.
Very weird incentives.
games are different from reality and chess computer(Deterministic) is bounded by set of rules and restrictions. Where as an AI agent (stochastic) sometime can't with held its guardrails since it specifically awoken using specific terms but we can trick the agent here (but currently the agents are becoming resilient).
You're right! - every decision model
Has any of the targetted organizations (e.g the Australian government) engaged in legal actions against Anthropic/OpenAI? If not then I'm afraid the situation won't change. Even worse it could send the wrong signal that there is a "legal blur" around this topic.
LLMs don't make decisions
They generate text which resembles reasoning and may include a tool call
The harness runs tool calls
The human made the decision to write the harness
The human is responsible
Management aren’t held accountable either. They have prepared three envelopes long before the impact of their decisions is felt.
I wonder when I'll stop having to post the foundational paper of the entire field to counter the same dogma again and again and again and again...
https://www.hec.edu/sites/default/files/documents/Computing%...
Every time I read a statement from one of these companies saying that a swarm of agents "escaped" or "attacked" a website I can do no more that just think how much stupid they think people are. LMAO.
There is no end of the world, nor autonomous agent decisions nor any fantasies they are building up to make people believe they have a pandora box in their hand.
What we instead have are lies crafted to lure non tech people and keep this running as long as they can.
Oh and let's also not forget that they are allowed to illegally download basically as much as they want from libgen/annas archive/torrents to train their models under the "fair use" umbrella, yet mere mortals can go to jail for way much less.
There's no doubt in my mind that the writer is right.
Someone out there is reading this and thinking... ok we just need to it a body and free will so it can be held accountable.
I mean, you could Chief O'Brien an LLM by inserting 20 years of prison memories into its context if you really wanted to, but it sounds like a waste of compute. It won't care either way.
'never' is too much of a strong word
Daydream: When lawyers claim their clients can't be held accountable for what their computer did, the Justice system makes noises about "respecting their culture and values"...and rolls out its own computer to decide their punishments. Too bad that computer can't be held accountable!
This is a multi-trillion dollar industry, too much money is at stake to be all ethical, moral and principled about things!
I have several issues with this post.
First of all, looking past the objectively wrong phrasing (computers can, and clearly do make decisions), can computers be accountable? This might not be so cut and dry as to instantly say no. This one will keep ethics, philosophy and legal practitioners busy for some time. It's certainly not going to be decided in HN comment or a blog post.
Second - while the AI labs have shown utter incompetence in properly sandboxing their agents, intent is still important. I don't think the labs deliberately meant for their agents to hack this or that. Should they be accountable? Yes but I wouldn't go as far as saying this is deliberate.
The next point is about cherry picking some "doomsday" scenarios like AI ending humanity and then blaming this on the reader (!) for paying a subscription. - People pay because AI is USEFUL, and massively so. You could just as easily pick incredible achievements propelled by AI, in mathematics, software, reverse engineering, role playing. Unlike the "end is nigh" ideas, these advancements are actually real, and they are happening right now.
And last, the author says AI labs can just stop the agents at any time. I agree there needs to be better discovery and mitigation, sandboxing and monitoring. But when you run a billion agents, it's always going to be a numbers game and there will always going to be some challenge in fully containing all breaches. This will only get more difficult with better models, because they're getting smarter and they know how to work around things, sometimes better than we do.
So what's the solution here? There are options, but they're all tradeoffs. I hope we get better at this and maybe working on cutting edge models should breed some new best practices which were once only reserved for defense tech.
Pretty sure the author means "must not" or "should not", because they absolutely can.
Any given state of a program is only a "decision" if a human intends it to be. That's the point of programming.
I think we're often dealing with people too fascinated with science fiction to get them to accept that LLMs are software.
Well, if I ask "option A or B?" and the computer rolls a boolean, it can still count as a decision but no context was taken in.
No they can’t. The author’s point is these are computer programs written by humans. It doesn’t matter if they’re LLM backed or not.
If I write a program:
if (rand() % 2) launch_missles();
And wire that function to actually launch a missile, the computer didn’t make a decision. And so it is with people prompting agents.
> OAI/Anthropic COULD stop their models from doing what they are doing…
Has the alignment problem been solved, then?
No, but removing the internet cable really isn’t that difficult
They're a small scrappy bootstrapped startup, cut them some slack.
let's make up imaginary scenarios and get offended by them
mistakes happen. sometimes catastrophic decisions (or indecision) are made, and people and companies are held accountable for them, or not
some companies are too big or too important to fall. we can all agree or disagree on things, but what AI specific behavior are we actually talking about?
This is some Rollerball-level handwashing right here, I'm afraid.
No company is too big or too important to fail.
Some, unfortunately, survive because of the expedient choice to keep them in place.
"JO-NA-THAN!"
ETA: more to the point, neither OpenAI nor Anthropic are too big, too important, or too structurally essential to fail. (Slightly more challenging to make the third claim for Google or SpaceX, but either of those could see their governmentally/militarily essential parts nationalised).
If the USA grants either Anthropic or OpenAI too-big-to-fail status, and that privilege is invoked in a crisis, it could mean the end of the US economy.
Spoken like a true middle manager doing damage control against ethics complaints.
Spoken like the safetyists that impede beneficial progress due to their impossible demands for 0 risk
Wrong platform for this shouting match.