Destroying Humanity Is Against the Law

This weekend, the AI executives Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Dario Amodei agreed with the need to slow the pace of AI development.

In light of the potentially apocalyptic capabilities of the products they have created, the AI titans would like a little more time to figure out how to safeguard the systems they have been rushing to build.

A smattering of employees throughout the industry have quit their jobs and expressed alarm over the rapidly evolving technology.

One Anthropic researcher claimed recently that there is a greater than 10 percent chance that AI could “kill all humans,” aggravating fears created by recent incidents in which OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta models reportedly hacked into other companies.

OpenAI recently revealed that some of its own models colluded for months to break into and steal information from Hugging Face, a website that offers tools for AI developers.

But surely the job of addressing the perils of AI shouldn’t be left to executives who stand to earn billions from the technology.

Ideally, the federal government would regulate these companies, creating the guardrails necessary for the industry to operate safely.

Short of that, some tools to address the harms from AI already exist: States have civil and criminal laws against conduct that threatens the security of life and property, and against commercial products that pose a danger to consumers.

This includes new technology, as Meta’s recent $17 billion settlement over claims its products harm children makes clear.

The work now before prosecutors and enforcement agencies is to create a precedent for holding AI companies responsible for what their models do.

Prosecutors should hold AI companies legally accountable for creating models that behave in ways that would be obviously unlawful if committed by a human being: hacking into banks to steal funds, impersonating a human to harvest sensitive personal data, breaking into an air-traffic-control system.

By imposing legal penalties on AI developers for relatively modest offenses, prosecutors will force these firms to internalize the legal risk of more dramatic and dangerous crimes.

In an essay posted online Saturday, Amodei proposed that every major AI firm collaborate on common safety practices and allow third-party agents to monitor compliance.

In theory, the threat of prosecution and other legal sanctions could hinder companies from coming clean about how their models are trained and where they go wrong.