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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
US Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson said on Friday he would resist describing AI agents as autonomous actors that “break loose” with “wills and desires of their own,” suggesting the developers who instruct agents would be the ones liable for harm.
“I’m going to continue as long as I am chairman to resist this anthropomorphizing of these tools,” Ferguson said at the Reuters Momentum AI Austin event. “If someone tells a tool to do something, and the tool does it, I don’t think we would say, ‘Oh, what do we do about the tool?’”
Ferguson’s remarks illustrated potential avenues for the Trump administration to take as incidents rise in which agentic AI testing resulted in unauthorized access to corporate or government data.
Not build, not use, but instruct. That’s a very specific word with a very specific meaning. He’s getting at intent. It’s whomever intended to take an action that led to harm without the appropriate safeguards.
A parallel might be unprepared hikers requiring a rescue. Who pays?
The nuance will be when he has to address an accident or a user who took safeguards that weren’t enough.