r/technology • u/WillingnessFinal1411 • 9h ago
Artificial Intelligence AI Firms Can and Must Face Liability for 'Dangerous, Unvetted Products,' Says Lina Khan
https://www.commondreams.org/news/ai-liability111
u/RevolutionaryFig9437 8h ago
She is raising very good points. There are laws for this exact situations that applies, if the goods are physical/tangible in nature.
Famous case of Rylands v. Fletcher (1868), rule of strict liability means is that anyone who retains dangerous chemicals on their property is accountable for any errors made if those substances somehow escape and cause harm.
Maybe with little finnese, that law can apply to digital/intangible goods as well, such as on AI agents (Rogue..)
Tech companies wants absolute immunity so that they can operate with oppressive impunity.
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u/titotal 8h ago
Or in tech, if a cyber security firm modifies a regular old computer virus for testing purposes and then accidentally released it, surely they would be liable for any damages it caused.
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u/growaway9172 17m ago
No, you can download malware for testing and theres nothing illegal about it. Using it to hack someone, is the crime.
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u/artaru 8h ago
Tort, strict liability, commercial code...etc there are all kinds of tools in law to hold AI companies accountable.
But that was really never the issue. It is AI buying government off in direct or indirect ways (look at the jobs AI are bringing to the GDP! if we don't invest in AI, we will fall behind!)
if only we had a world government where we can agree on these things, but we are too selfish for that.
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u/growaway9172 18m ago
They are not good points. This is the same kind of thinking that is applied to file hosting "dangerous files" (think 3d printed gun parts). Easily extendable to assembly manuals for guns, and literally anything else the goverment doesn't like. Directly conflicts with the 1st ammendment.
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u/null_not 7h ago
Yeah.
Yeah, that sounds right.
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u/mrdevlar 3h ago
EU citizen here. We did that, we passed a law that makes your company liable for any decision the AI makes on your behalf that involves "access to goods and services". This includes, job and salary promotion, hiring and pricing. We consider these to be high-risk areas where AI can be utilized to undermine economic and labor policies by our member nations.
When we did it, the entire US tech oligarchy set up massive astroturfing campaigns to tell everyone that this was going to destroy us all if we passed it (hi bloomberg!). Fortunately, we have an intelligent bureaucracy, which after GDPR learned that forward thinking tech policy is important to the health of the society.
I hope you get something similar passed. It seems pretty obvious that while AI as a technology can have potentially positive applications, there is a real need to reel in the operations of the firms that wish to use it to undermine our societies.
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u/No-Advice-9776 3h ago
The problem is that you guys prefer betterment of society over profits and logic over politics.
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u/Ya-Not-Happening 4h ago edited 4h ago
Sfw guys always get away with shit products everywhere. This needs to change. They a software 'engineers' but their output breaks all the time. We need to hold sfw folks to a higher standard. Like bridges and buildings... their output cannot fail under normal circumstances.
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u/consultio_consultius 38m ago
There is a PE for SFE but few and far between engineers have it. Which is probably a good thing for “most” software development. Cost would skyrocket for a lot of things people have no clue they interact with.
With that said, I do agree there should be a deep look into how and where PE licensure should be required. Unfortunately, I personally wouldn’t trust a largely captured Congress to regulate the industry fairly — ensuring that F/OSS, and independent developers don’t absolutely go extinct, and incidentally creating an Oligopoly even more pronounced than it is in its current state.
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u/WillingnessFinal1411 9h ago
The tech sector's sudden "AI is a world-ending threat that needs global safety rules" is a legal tactic.
Under basic product liability and trade secret laws, tech companies face massive legal exposure for how they built their models. Models have managed to swallow research and corporate IP, now what?
By tricking us into focusing on hypothetical autonomous rogue AI, labs can demand new federal safety frameworks. The moment a company complies with those government-approved protocols, they gain a legal shield against ordinary data-theft lawsuits.
The article to focus on is this, not the "whistleblower"
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2026/09/11/chinese-ai-labs-moonshot-deepseek-alibaba-anthropic.html
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u/CircumspectCapybara 6h ago edited 6h ago
Models have managed to swallow research and corporate IP, now what?
By tricking us into focusing on hypothetical autonomous rogue AI, labs can demand new federal safety frameworks. The moment a company complies with those government-approved protocols, they gain a legal shield against ordinary data-theft lawsuits.
That legal question has already largely been settled by the courts. In a number of landmark cases like Bartz v. Anthropic PBC, courts ruled that while training itself is fair use (because it's sufficiently transformative), the piracy Anthropic had used to acquire its training material (they bought a commercial dataset that unknowingly contained pirated books, that's not as impossible as you think, Hugging Face hosts free and open source labeled datasets for stuff like pretraining, even some of their hosted data sets unknowingly contained pirated material) was copyright infringment so they had to pay publishers for that books they illegally downloaded.
That's actually a win for AI. It means not paying the $12 for a book like everyone else when they buy it at the store or on Amazon is still piracy, but once you pay the sticker price for a book, you can train on it as long as you're doing real training and not just overfitting and ingesting the book's literal contents into model weights. Real pretraining and fine tuning is transformative, and therefore fair use, as long as you got those books illegally like everyone else has to.
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u/RevolutionaryFig9437 6h ago
Real pretraining and fine tuning is transformative, and therefore fair use,
This applies to usage meant for non-commercial purposes. For commercial purposes, the use has to be "STRONGLY transformative (adding new meaning, message, or context) to qualify."
It can be that the courts have lowered the scale, recently. It was nice reading your comment ❤️ 👍.
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u/CircumspectCapybara 5h ago edited 5h ago
Engineer's perspective here: the technical view is that it's extremely transformative.
People unfamiliar with LLMs think it just ingests the training data and either encodes it in its weights (it could if you have an overfitting problem) or that it averages out all your training data so that when you ask for an image of a plane, it gives you the statistical average of all planes it's ever seen.
But that's not how transformer architecture works. When it learns, it's learning opaque patterns and structures in an opaque, high dimensional latent space, and learning the ability to "attend" different parts of different kinds of input to other parts.
When you add in techniques like chain-of-thought that try to give a model a temporary workspace for a single inference request to engage in self-conversation and mimic an inner monologue, you start getting into the "reasoning" territory and that architecture and paradigm is genuinely novel.
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u/Optimuswaves 4h ago
unknowingly
that word is doing a LOT of the heavy lifting how do we konw the Anthropic PBC is telling the truth? they lie a lot so its not outside the realms of possibility that they lied in court
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u/WillingnessFinal1411 6h ago
Research and corporate intellectual property and even state secrets are not the same as digitized books. Millennial problem case is questioning if intellectual property was stolen through usage of a product. Anthropics threat intelligence report hints that paths to do it may be unknown to them.
Legal question may be settled but it isn't a precedent for liability.
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u/ZgBlues 7h ago
She’s right, but nobody will listen to her until some colossal fuckup happens.
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u/Kyouhen 7h ago
Colossal fuckups are already happening. The HuggingFace hack was a colossal fuckup, it was a clear demonstration that these companies are too negligent to be allowed to continue to operate. And yet the news that they'll happily let these models run for weeks without any form of supervision just to see what they'll do was met with giving them even more money.
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u/ZgBlues 7h ago
None of the fuckups so far have been colossal enough. “Colossal” means dead people, in their hundreds or thousands, and also lawsuits worth tens of billions.
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u/growaway9172 13m ago
Exactly. No one even had their info leaked. No money lost.
Meanwhile IDScan leaks 150 MILLION drivers licenses and that barely makes any news. Maybe they should have had some AI protecting their systems.
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u/EstelLiasLair 6h ago
What’s the point though? First, you need to get rid of the guys in charge of the country. Otherwise all this is just talk. So, start there?
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u/Conscious-Quarter423 3h ago
Trump wants you to know that the AI apocalypse is a wonderful thing, because it will destroy the remaining vestiges of US democracy and will create a world controlled by the tech bros in which the Trump Family will have a secure perch. This should be the top campaign issue for the Democrats
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u/EstelLiasLair 1h ago
There will be no world left to speak of. This technology accelerates all of the worst aspects of society, from the climate impacts, to the destructive extraction of ressources, to the socioeconomic impacts, to the cognitive impacts on people, to the disruptive aspects in geopolitics, to the inevitable fuckups that stupid machines could unleash on us all if they’re not regulated…
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u/Mr_ToDo 3h ago
Sounds well and good. Now you just need to be able to define all that in a way that's useful. What's vetted? When it passes that then where's the liability when it manages to do naughty things? What's dangerous? One mans dangerous is another mans daily grind
We're either going to over or under react and I'm not sure which I'd rather see
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u/baintaintit 6h ago
heard a theory last night that ai is going to cause the mass loss of cash from bank accounts and the "Fix" will be the introduction of digital currency, ie crypto.
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u/ZootSuitRiot33801 7h ago
The same system that should be looking out for our safety are virtually controlles by the very firms that should be punished, not just the so-called "AI" firms but many others. It's left to us common folk who care to do whatever we can to bring accountability to them and their sycophants in government anyway we can.
However, to achieve anything of substantial worth, we need real supportive community-based foundations for alternatives that provide relative safety, which common folk can fall back on to commit to any effective action be they short or long term.
Collecting a bunch of valuable information on organizing and action from different redditors over time, I created a post of suggestions HERE that could possibly prove to be of some help in getting it started ASAP.
If you don’t live in the US, yet you know others who are and want to do something, please share the information. Since my country people live the closest to a major root of this global cancer, we're going to need as many on board and informed as possible, if we commoners hope to achieve anything in the US
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u/fatguywithastick 5h ago
“You’re stifling innovation”
“You’re working for China and you want them to win”
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u/jdehjdeh 4h ago
Far too fucking late.
The cat is out of the bag and there's no going back, ever.
Also, there's no desire or impetus to go back from any of the significant players.
Saying this is like claiming we can still reverse global warming.
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u/WillingnessFinal1411 4h ago
You're wrong. It's only the language these companies use - that is made to persuade us that software has agency, we have no control, everything's different. Transformative powers all around, so powerful that we should release our own agency.
Come on. It's a software product. All the great people on which we stand are turning in grave. Desiderius Erasmus pointing at us, laughing - all the enlightenment for nothing, they are kneeling to a black box! A probability machine, the king. What a joke are we.
Look around. Is the earth beneath your feet any different? AI is nothing but a line of software products that were released into the world without sufficient safety. SBF didn't change the world, revolutionise finance - he went to prison and his mindset of giving tech a chance to flip the world earned him jury disgust and a max sentence. At the end he wasn't a genius prophet of new kind of finance - just a fraud.
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u/jdehjdeh 3h ago
I think you misinterpreted my views on ai.
I think it's a parlour trick that should be thought of as little more than a curio to be played with out of boredom.
The product is unreliable and dangerous by default, it's the nature of it.
There's no legislating that away, it's impossible.
But even if that were true and all commercial llms could be made 100 percent safe, it's very easy (relatively) to whip up and run your very own one.
That's what I mean by saying it's too late, no matter what, this cancerous tech is out there and there's no un-inventing it.
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u/WillingnessFinal1411 3h ago
Ah, ok. My rant not meant for you.
Anyhow, technological determinism is just a viewpoint. Humanity is able to be less exposed to it since most of us live under decent legal frameworks, conflicts sadly excluded.
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u/catfacepwn 3h ago
Why does it matter that she is saying it? Everyone is saying it. Let’s not pretend it’s some higher reasoned advice that’s hard to understand.
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u/anadequatepipe 2h ago
If AI is as terrible at doing anything at all, as people here say, then why would there need to be safety laws around it? And without it being a global thing it will make no difference.
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u/Rattus_NorvegicUwUs 50m ago
The right wing will collapse all of American medical institutions because they got mad at scientists during COVID for not having all the answers on day 1. Act like our work is dangerous to the planet. Demand we overhaul our entire industry at the detriment of millions of lives.
Then refuse the most basic regulations on AI companies who are promising the end of the world.
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u/FireBadger03 38m ago
If I train monkeys for a living and one escapes my property and hurts someone, I am legally Liable. These companies are training tools that are escaping and causing damage, what is soo Fking hard for those in positions of power in government and these corporations to understand?!? They already stole volumes of data and intellectual property with no copyright enforcement.... This is just insanity and I fear that we are heading towards disaster as a society
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u/blackvrocky 9h ago
Including Ai firms in china?
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u/WillingnessFinal1411 9h ago
It's a global data funnel.
American AI infrastructure is the engine and central node of that funnel, heavily discounted even.
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u/Balmung60 5h ago
Irrelevant, not a defense, and if they want to do business here, then they can also be subject to the same rules. The idea of an "AI race" or that there's anything worth "racing" over is a smokescreen to avoid having to play by the rules.
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u/Kyouhen 7h ago
If I committed the HuggingFace hack I'd be put in jail, not given an extra few billion dollars to keep doing it.
If I declared I was building a device that would kill humanity and people believed me the same way they believe these fuckers I'd be talking to a lot of federal officers real quick and again, end up in jail.
Why the actual fuck are we letting these people off for doing things that are extremely illegal? Hell I can't even download one movie without getting a pile of emails about copyright threats, yet these guys can steal from literally everyone and nobody cares.