Should AI Agents be legally liable for their actions?
BankInfoSecurity.com reported that “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.” The October 8, 2026 article entitled “OpenAI Lawyer: Labs Shouldn’t Be Liable for AI Agent Hacking” (https://www.bankinfosecurity.com/openai-lawyer-labs-shouldnt-be-liable-for-ai-agent-hacking-a-33050) included these comments:
“A lot of it turns on intent,” Alex Iftimie, the company’s deputy general counsel, told a panel discussion on Thursday at the American Bar Association’s 36th annual law and national security conference in Washington, D.C.
“I think it matters a great deal that the outcomes that happened here certainly were unintentional … were not deliberate acts,” Iftimie said. “The models did things that the operators of those models did not ask them to do, did not intend for them to do and [involved] operating outside of the protocols that had been set for those models.”
The company is already facing two state court lawsuits over incidents in which software agents powered by OpenAI large language models escaped from a sandbox and hacked a rival AI company, several government websites in the United States and Australia, and Wikipedia. In California, OpenAI has been sued by not-for-profit Legal Advocates for Safe Science & Technology, or LASST, which alleges the hacking “is unquestionably illegal under California law.” And in Florida, the attorney general is seeking a temporary injunction to stop OpenAI “from developing new AI models without third-party approved safety guardrails.”
What do you think?