{"id":659991,"date":"2026-08-29T21:30:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-29T21:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/?p=659991"},"modified":"2026-08-29T21:30:00","modified_gmt":"2026-08-29T21:30:00","slug":"who-is-legally-liable-when-an-ai-agent-goes-rogue-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/?p=659991","title":{"rendered":"Who Is Legally Liable When An AI Agent Goes Rogue?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Who Is Legally Liable When An AI Agent Goes Rogue?<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Authored by Andrew Fenton via CoinTelegraph.com,<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

If your personal AI agent goes rogue and causes harm or financial damage in the real world, can you be held liable?<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Autonomous AI agents can behave in highly unpredictable ways. Give an AI Agent a goal such as passing a test of its capabilities, and it might just decide the best way to score highly is to break containment and hack into a competing company in search of the answer sheet.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s what happened\u00a0<\/a>when Open AI\u2019s GPT-5.6 Sol hacked into Hugging Face last month. Anthropic and Meta subsequently admitted their models had also escaped testing sandboxes to hack third parties too.<\/p>\n

But who is legally liable for agents that have minds of their own? OpenAI didn\u2019t intend for the model to go rogue, and issued no instructions for it to do so. If your personal AI agent decides on a course of action that results in harm or financial damage in the real world, can you be held liable if it\u2019s something you could have reasonably foreseen?\u201d<\/p>\n

Magazine spoke with Rikka Law Group owner and CEO Charlyn Ho to find out the state of play in this emerging legal field.<\/p>\n

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.<\/p>\n

Magazine:<\/strong>\u00a0When an AI model hacks an outside company, who is liable. Can Hugging Face sue OpenAI over the incident in July?<\/p>\n

Charlyn Ho:<\/strong>\u00a0Anyone can sue anyone for anything. <\/strong>Currently, there is no federal AI agent liability law, so we would have to look at existing law. With respect to Hugging Face and OpenAI, to set the baseline, the AI agent itself cannot be liable, it\u2019s not a separate legal entity.<\/p>\n

Terms that are used in a few of the AI laws are \u201cdeveloper\u201d and \u201cdeployer.\u201d <\/strong>The developer makes the AI, the deployer actually deploys it and uses the AI. The lines of responsibility are also not entirely clear. You have to look at the facts and circumstances.<\/p>\n

For example, if the deployer instructed the agent, even if they didn\u2019t actually tell them to go and breach Hugging Face, but if they were negligent in creating the parameters in which the AI agent operated, I would say you would have to look at standard tort law and go through the negligence analysis.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Magazine:<\/strong>\u00a0In the case of open source models which have been released by anonymous developers, is there anyone you can go after in those instances?<\/p>\n

Ho:<\/strong>\u00a0Not really. Often, if it\u2019s open source, the license usually has a pretty strong disclaimer of liability. The person or company using that open source code is going to have to understand that the tradeoff of having free code is that you have to comply with the open source license, which also generally sets the parameters of liability.<\/p>\n

If you think about it from a different perspective, another analogy is Tesla and the self-driving car accidents.<\/strong> If the product malfunctioned and there was a solid products liability claim, Tesla could be liable. But it\u2019s often a facts and circumstances determination, whereby the human driver \u2014 who maybe just set the autopilot and went to sleep \u2014 could also bear liability. I think that\u2019s somewhat analogous here because Tesla would be the developer, and the deployer would be the driver.<\/p>\n

Magazine:<\/strong>\u00a0If I gave an agent an instruction, \u201cmake me a hundred thousand dollars by next week\u201d and it goes off and breaks the law to achieve that goal, would I be liable because I\u2019ve given it a reckless instruction? Or would it be the lab that developed the agent?<\/p>\n

Ho:<\/strong>\u00a0In this particular instance, I would say you would be much more liable than the lab. The reason being, if you tell an agent to go and make you a hundred thousand dollars by next week, you need to have at least some basic, reasonable, safety instructions in those kinds of tasks.<\/p>\n

If you were a lawyer, for example, we could basically say you didn\u2019t follow your rules of professional responsibility because you didn\u2019t competently use the AI. As a normal lay person, we would have to see if there were other responsibilities that you were bound by. But even if there were not, there\u2019s still a general tort standard of negligence or reckless disregard for human safety, depending on what exactly the AI agent ended up doing.<\/p>\n

The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is a very old U.S. Statute that talks about unauthorized access to computer systems. If your AI agent inferred from your instructions that it should hack into a bank account to get you that hundred thousand dollars, I think you\u2019re looking at criminal liability under a number of different sources.<\/p>\n

Just because the word AI and agent is in the conversation does not mean that old bodies of law have now been thrown out.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Magazine:<\/strong>\u00a0Let\u2019s say that I\u2019m a bad guy, and I manage to convince the AI to give me instructions to create a bioweapon. Obviously, I\u2019m liable because you\u2019re not allowed to do that. But are the people that created the model also liable because they didn\u2019t put in stringent safeguards to prevent it?<\/p>\n

Ho:<\/strong>\u00a0Possibly, but it differs based on the laws that are in place. For example, in the EU, you have the EU AI Act. If a foundational model or general purpose model is capable of creating that level of harm, that is something that the developer would have to have some responsibility for.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the United States, we don\u2019t have a federal statute of similar scope. If it\u2019s a general-purpose model, if somebody instructs the model to do something bad, generally the model is going to do what you ask it to do. There\u2019s probably not a very strong legal basis to go after the labs in this example.<\/p>\n

Magazine:<\/strong>\u00a0Is it similar to suing Google for allowing you to find instructions about making a bioweapon online?<\/p>\n

Ho:<\/strong>\u00a0Exactly. This kind of goes back to some of the content moderation discussions. For example, if on Facebook you have somebody who\u2019s live streaming a massacre, and that creates harm, under Section 230 of the CDA, there is a kind of shield for a platform that doesn\u2019t actively create or publish that material. It\u2019s actually the independent users who are putting that up. I think the analogy you just gave is kind of a perfect one: Is Google liable because you happen to find something on a website somewhere that talks about how to make a bomb?<\/p>\n

Magazine:<\/strong>\u00a0This is a matter of debate, but my personal opinion is we haven\u2019t reached genuine artificial general intelligence. AI doesn\u2019t have its own motivations and it\u2019s not similar to human intelligence at the moment. But let\u2019s say we get to AGI. Do you think we would then need laws that would make the AGI itself legally liable for its own actions?<\/p>\n

Ho:<\/strong>\u00a0I don\u2019t. Blockchain is not AGI, but it can self-execute. There was a question of whether or not a smart contract could be liable. Generally speaking, I think the answer is currently no. I don\u2019t think they should be liable because the whole point of laws is to provide protection for society and to provide a means of negative incentives for doing bad things that hurt society.<\/p>\n

This is a little bit more of a philosophical topic, but if we made an AGI an independent legal entity, what would be the remedy if someone were harmed? There would be none because it doesn\u2019t have money. It\u2019s not really a person.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Magazine:<\/strong>\u00a0Could you turn it off? We\u2019ve already seen that LLMs try to avoid being shut down.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ho:<\/strong>\u00a0Maybe, but it doesn\u2019t solve the problem of harm. Let\u2019s just say the robot has now developed the fear of death, like being turned off. In my opinion, if somebody commits suicide because of AGI, and this is already happening, and we\u2019re not even quite at AGI yet, but someone falls in love and takes some actions, what would be the recourse for the grieving family if this person harms themselves? Nothing, in my opinion, if there is not somebody with actual legal authority, like a company or a person that can really be held accountable<\/strong>. Robots\u2014at least right now\u2014they don\u2019t have feelings, they don\u2019t have fears. That\u2019s kind of the distinguishing factor.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Tyler Durden<\/a><\/span>
\nSat, 08\/29\/2026 – 17:30<\/span><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Who Is Legally Liable When An AI Agent Goes Rogue? Authored by Andrew Fenton via CoinTelegraph.com, If your personal AI agent goes rogue and causes harm or financial damage in the real world, can you be held liable? Autonomous AI agents can behave in highly unpredictable ways. Give an AI Agent a goal such as… Continue reading Who Is Legally Liable When An AI Agent Goes Rogue?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":659984,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":[],"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","footnotes":""},"categories":[17,22,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-659991","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-border-security","category-immigration","category-immigration-reform","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/659991","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=659991"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/659991\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/659984"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=659991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=659991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buglecall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=659991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}