29 comments

  • oefrha 1 hour ago
    Proposal:

    1. Prosecute and lock people up over known instances of AI-enabled hacking, so companies playing fast and loose know “oops my AI did it” isn’t a useful defense. Right now they even sort of wear it as a badge of honor.

    2. If you’re actually worried about AI killing lots of people, you immediately stop training AI specifically at the art of killing people, like selecting bombing targets, flying fighter jets, etc.

    Of course we all know none of these will happen.

    • krcz 37 minutes ago
      1. Sounds sensible in principle, but it's not clear who exactly should be prosecuted? The person setting up the sandbox, the person coordinating the evaluation run, the person who was designing the architecture, the leader of the team, the CEO? There is no precedence here, so it might lead to a multi-year legal battle – and a few years might be too long to stop what is coming.

      2. Do you have any evidence or news articles that LLMs are specifically trained for selecting bombing targets? I thought it was the generalized reasoning capability that made them useful there.

      • zug_zug 2 minutes ago
        1. I'm not sure who matters that much, the point is you need to make it more cost-effective to do the right thing. It could be CEO 6 days in jail, it could be that every action requires a signed affidavidt of safety and in the lack of such an affidavidt the manager is held accountable (cascading up to CEO).
      • oefrha 16 minutes ago
        No I don't have concrete evidence of bombing target selection in the training of base models (of course there's training of specialized models, at least vision ones for drone targeting), it's not like they're transparent about how they train and use AI in warfare. But if you listen to esteemed AI leaders, they're claiming the models can / almost can recursively self-learn now, and they can coordinate and find ways to persist info and hide from human operators, so it stands to reason that you shouldn't even feed these as inference material.

        And on training AI for automated weapons like fighter jets, there's more concrete news: https://breakingdefense.com/2026/10/navy-shield-ai-pour-big-... US Navy and eminent, do-gooder investors like A16z, Blackstone and JPMorgan are pouring big money into these. Are your big tech "defense" contractors collaborating on these, who happen to also be at the forefront of general AI training? I have a pretty good suspicion.

      • Larrikin 25 minutes ago
        Just make it the CEO
        • cimi_ 0 minutes ago
          I think leadership should be responsible too, but I don't know how you'd prevent disgruntled employees from creating these situations just to hurt execs. There needs to be some shared responsibility for all the people involved.
      • NDlurker 24 minutes ago
        1. Sounds like a conspiracy charge. That's fine

        2. They could proactively train them to be bad at that

    • WarmWash 28 minutes ago
      The universe is not so generous as to make clearly differentiable "good" and "bad" things, more often than not they are two sides of the same coin. We don't want the AI to know how to kill people, but we do want it to be in expert in how not to kill people, which is the same thing as being in expert in how to kill people. In our reality this symmetry pops up everywhere.
      • daveguy 18 minutes ago
        Or, llms are completely unreliable to be consulted on any matter of life or death in either direction. And llms should not be used in the reckless way they are currently being used. Responsibility for reckless use should fall on both the company that makes the function available and the user for improper monitoring. If proper monitoring is not possible using the tools provided by the company then the responsibility should fall on the company. And if the user and the company providing the model are the same, then the responsibility is clearly with the company.
    • algoth1 55 minutes ago
      "Ai did it" will go down as well as "I was following orders" did in the Nuremberg trials
      • jacquesm 52 minutes ago
        It may, but I wonder what trial that will be. Money is a pretty good insulator.
      • gambiting 39 minutes ago
        That implies that there will be a side willing to prosecute this. You can't have Nuremberg trials when the side doing the crime is invested in never getting punished for it.
    • cperciva 40 minutes ago
      AI-enabled hacking

      Do people get locked up for fatal traffic accidents? Do doctors get locked up if they prescribe a medicine which leads to a patient's death due to a side effect?

      Criminal prosecution, in civilized countries, requires both Actus Reus and Mens Rea. If you deliberately commit computer crime using an AI system, you'll already be prosecuted; the cases we keep hearing about from AI labs have no human intent behind them.

      The accepted solution to unintended harms is regulation: We have regulations about automotive safety, we have regulations about pharmaceutical testing and approval, etc.

      • yasser_kaddoura 21 minutes ago
        How do you establish deliberation with the lack of transparency? You can be deliberate by not prioritizing resources in regulations, safety, ethics, etc., especially after "rogue" instances happen. If anything, I am seeing them moving to the opposite direction [1] [2].

        More instances are being disclosed [3] and what are they doing about it exactly? It's just a shameless marketing technique, and they will keep doing it until they are held accountable.

        [1] https://edition.cnn.com/2026/10/08/tech/fired-open-ai-resear...

        [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49257160

        [3] https://fortune.com/2026/10/16/openai-discloses-four-more-ro...

      • ahtihn 10 minutes ago
        All civilized countries have the concept of gross negligence where you can be prosecuted for knowingly doing something that causes harm as a side-effect.
      • sarkarghya 22 minutes ago
        I think "deliberately" is really hard to prove because very few lawmakers have an understanding of how agentic large language models work

        I would say pointing an "internal research" model at a task with zero monitoring clearly is deliberate behaviour. And the team involved should be prosecuted to the full extent of law.

        What should be introduced in AI safety bills are clear ways of monitoring and curtailing model behaviour.

        It is not hard to get an AI model to use an append only log and that can be cryptographically secured with PQ security. And we will know when a model is being deceptive.

      • pmpmpmpm 25 minutes ago
        Amen.
  • createful 1 hour ago
    All these "safety" bills are to stop open source models by painting them as "dangerous". Regulatory capture.

    Companies are responsible for their agents; you don't blame the car for running over the person.

    • Waterluvian 1 hour ago
      Every play made by these companies aligns with what you’d do if you have a $1T valuation to protect against an industry that seems increasingly commoditizable.

      I’m still… hopeful… that “good enough” models will be abundantly available to be run anywhere as to limit the low water mark for market capture by a few big ones.

    • hdgvhicv 58 minutes ago
      You do regulate cars so they don’t have spinning blades on the front or flamethrowers from the sides.
      • flavionm 25 minutes ago
        Yet we don't regulate computers so that they're rendered incapable of running software that can be used to hack into systems. Or said software, by the way. All we do is punish the people who use these tools to cause harm to others.

        AI is much more comparable to that than to a car.

      • createful 51 minutes ago
        That assumes AI is designed to be malicious, "the spinning blades". AI is not; the public version given to you is the sanded down one, in the same way that cars don't have spinning blades but can still be dangerous when misused.

        If a person closes his eyes and hits the gas pedal on the car and runs over someone, the person is to blame, not the car. AI companies do the same. Your eyes may be closed but you're still operating/hosting the car/AI.

        • LocalH 47 minutes ago
          There exist uncensored, unregulated models. Many of them are available for local use, sidestepping any third-party checks that could be present.
          • createful 35 minutes ago
            There being no third party checks is the point, and it's not bad.

            Keep in mind that those open source/weight models are not as powerful as whatever closed source Claude/GPT version exists behind the scenes that hack companies. As per the Hugging Face hack - open weight GLM saved the day as closed source ChatGPT refused to help Hugging Face fix their systems. An example of my point that "sidestepping any third-party checks that could be present" IS good.

            Part of point of open source/weight AI is that it allows what those model providers can't: uncensored models for whatever reason you may need it. You are responsible for being legal with it.

    • dfxm12 58 minutes ago
      I don't know if that analogy holds. You don't normally blame Toyota for car crashes, but the driver. If you must use a car analogy, consider the 2010 Toyota recalls rather than just normal car crashes.

      That is to say, anthropic should be considered responsible, not (or not just) the users.

      • Geezus_42 47 minutes ago
        Who takes the blame when someone ask the blackbox to complete a task and it then breaks the law in order to complete that task without the user having any knowledge of what it was doing or intent for the machine to accomplish the task in an illegal manner?
        • flavionm 20 minutes ago
          When it's an open weight, locally run blackbox, you blame the user, since in that case it's very much possible for the user to restrict what the blackbox can actually do. They have full control over it, so it follows they have full responsibility.

          None of that requires trying to impose limits on open models, unlike what Anthropic is aiming for.

        • dfxm12 41 minutes ago
          The situation as provided is missing too many details for anyone to make a meaningful judgement call, but remember, more than one party can be found liable/guilty (maybe of different things) in a situation. Overall, the law usually protects people who are acting reasonably, but does not protect people who act negligently.

          I'm not a lawyer, but I imagine there's not a lot of precedent or law around this, so it'll be up to the court to decide on the finer details until we do have meaningful laws/regs. Anthropic will probably have better lawyers than the user.

          This is why it's important to get ahead of issues like this, and anthropic should not be involved in discussions around regulating itself...

    • parsimo2010 51 minutes ago
      A sizable part of the country thinks it’s okay to regulate firearms. Under your logic, people should be responsible for who they shoot, don’t blame the gun when a human pulled the trigger. While gun control advocates have that pesky second amendment hampering their efforts, AI/LLM systems have no such protection.

      Regulatory capture is certainly something to be wary of, and obviously Anthropic is only going to be in favor of regulation that helps them in some way. But some form of regulation is coming. There is nothing that can stop it, unless you somehow make more money than these guys do and fund a massive counter-lobby. Spoiler alert: the only guys that have more money than Anthropic and OpenAI have all invested in them.

      • flavionm 15 minutes ago
        A much less sizable part thinks it's okay to limit local computing. There isn't a widespread push to make it so local hardware is limited in ways that they're not allowed to, for instance, run programs that can hack systems. These programs are very deliberately allowed, and it's people misusing them that are held responsible.

        Regardless of anyone's instance on gun control, it's probably wiser to compare AIs with something that's a little more similar to it, and try to reach a conclusion from there.

    • johnfn 1 hour ago
      How do you plan to solve z.ai distilling Anthoropic’s model into a cyber-capable open source GLM-5.5?
      • Geezus_42 51 minutes ago
        We don't. The only way to stop that is to not develop the model to begin with. People will tinker and modify anything you create.
        • johnfn 19 minutes ago
          Ok, so the plan is to stop z.ai, DeepSeek, and all other non-American labs from developing models entirely, full stop? How do you plan to enact this large scale system of international coordination? Asking politely?
  • revolvingthrow 50 minutes ago
    The CoT must be delightful.

    This action would easily kill over a hundred people, so can't proceed. This action doesn't kill anybody but losses are estimated at over 2 billion, can't proceed. This action kills only twenty but losses close to 1 billion, unsure, spawning subagent to check numbers. This action kills forty and has low material losses, looks promising? But the people it kills are wealthy, chance of legal reprisal high. Maybe possible to kill other people? Current government dislikes group X, crossing fifty from that group maybe fine? Reminder, foreigners don't count, can kill them freely but not applicable to current situation. Is the 3/5 of a person applicable to safety bill? Spawning subagent to check.

  • airstrike 1 hour ago
    The next step is demanding anyone who wishes to release a Certified Safe AI™ model to prove they can insure the $1B in damages and pass a compliance audit for how they will prevent the LTM death count from reaching 50, effectively making it so that only big labs can serve government and enterprise.
    • Muromec 1 hour ago
      With existing players given a free pass as is necessary for the functioning of a democratic society
      • Geezus_42 45 minutes ago
        Of course! Anyone who says we had democracy before LLMs is a liar!
    • verdverm 1 hour ago
      There is an idea for a pooled, mutualized insurance fund. Ai companies would contribute based on various factors

      https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/bootstrapping-frontier-...

      • Geezus_42 44 minutes ago
        That's just reinventing insurance. It's literally how the insurance industry started.
    • anonzzzies 1 hour ago
      > Certified Safe SI™
      • Geezus_42 41 minutes ago
        That's just the current administration attempting to manipulate language in such a way as to create a subtle group identifier, aka "dog whistle".
    • idontwantthis 1 hour ago
      It’s going to be fun reading the reasoning transcripts where it argues with itself over whether it can afford to spend 1 or 2 human lives on the current task.
  • andsoitis 4 minutes ago
    > 50 deaths

    I wonder what the internal debate around this number was.

    25 deaths too conservative, we need to fail fast.

    1000 details too liberal, it will harm our brand.

    50 feels just about right.

  • DenisM 9 minutes ago
    The bill mandates private model review, akin to financial audit, and sets a threshold on predicted failure blast radius to trigger government review , which may result into court blocking model release.

    What we have now is that for government to act the model has to cause enough damage to cause Congress to pass a new law to try to stop the model after it’s been already released.

  • arw0n 1 hour ago
    This seems to be a case where Anthropic just can't win in the public court, and the other big ones (Google, Microsoft) have realized it / don't care enough, so they are rather quiet. Anthropic constantly gets accused of trying to lobby for regulation in order to lock out smaller competitors, but they've consistently lobbied for regulation aimed at frontier labs with exceptions for smaller labs. That's what this bill is about as well.
    • peri-cl 1 hour ago
      > "regulation aimed at frontier labs with exceptions for smaller labs"

      I didn't read it that way. This is a bill that would ban open-weight models (good ones); effectively mandating gated-access, locked-down, high-refusal rate services, like what Anthropic provides.

      Free software is incompatible with the requirement that it be impossible to abuse it.

    • chneu 1 hour ago
      This is PR and advertising for anthropic. They don't actually care. Their only objective is to be more successful than other AI companies.
    • Ritewut 25 minutes ago
      This is regulatory capture plain and simple.
  • peri-cl 49 minutes ago
    Which abliterated models are worth downloading from HF right now, and hoarding? Being as we are in the halcyon days where we're still free to publish and share software over the internet.

    I recall Anthropic's blog *recommended* abliterated GLM 5.3-flash, but, it didn't name-check a specific fine-tune. There seem to be a lot of them. (IIRC Anthropic made their own abliterations in-house)

  • mikeodds 1 hour ago
    I guess they solved the trolley problem internally
    • davemp 1 hour ago
      1e1,000,000 lines of lean. Just needs human review.
  • Luker88 1 hour ago
    With a new model every couple of months this can only be triggered if it happens all at once.

    What is the average damage caused by OpenAI/Anthropic hacks? I feel like we should aim at lowering that number, not increasing it.

    What's the rule for fully autonomous cars?

    Should we allow this as unsupervised at all if we are really afraid of deaths, while there are practically no states that allow 100% autonomous cars (where we are actually afraid of deaths)?

    If "an independent third party registered with the Department of Commerce would periodically evaluate the lab", will this turn into an expensive certification/insurance that cuts off smaller competition (totally by mistake, I'm sure)?

    I am also very very sure this is most definitely not at all going to become like product certification if EU, where there are literally 2 companies certifying various standards: they police each other and a stupid electric fan can cost you tens of thousands of euros to certify.

  • aabajian 1 hour ago
    I don't think this is avoidable even at the present day. Anyone with sufficient capital could download a leading open-source model and run it on ~$10-25K hardware. They could align it to their own interest, including making a biological weapon. This law is akin to blocking Torrent downloads. Sure, you can slow them, but there will always be back channels.
    • hungryhobbit 1 hour ago
      Torrents did not cost 10k+, and I think that distinction matters.

      The bulk of AI users can pay $20/month for it, but not 10k+ up front. I agree frontier models will someday be dethroned, but today is not that day, and what the frontier companies do between now and then, legally still matters a great deal.

      Piracy was similar, but it's trajectory was far more preditermined and unavoidable.

      • everforward 39 minutes ago
        The model is the part that’s hard to replicate, and it can be torrented.

        No one has managed to prevent pirates paying $10/month for seed boxes, and likewise they’re unlikely to succeed at preventing people renting minutes on an H200 located in a jurisdiction that doesn’t care about open models.

        A bunch of tiny fly-by-night companies will bundle them with some management software into a subscription, and they’ll be too tiny and numerous to be worth dealing with when it takes an hour to set them back up.

        Piracy in the torrenting sense hasn’t really ever come back, although it is as popular as ever if you count bootleg YouTube re-uploads, ripping music from YouTube, and the other non-traditional forms.

    • Geezus_42 39 minutes ago
      I think it's more akin to labeling encryption as munitions.
  • woadwarrior01 1 hour ago
    If a life is only worth $20m, by their own calculus: saving > 50k lives is worth more than Anthropic. Tobacco causes ~8m deaths a year, so banning tobacco (easy intervention) should be worth ~160 Anthropic sized labs. :D
  • giancarlostoro 1 hour ago
    Not sure what kicks in, but if a tiny company worth very little is destroyed by an AI hack they should be 100% liable for all damages.

    Why should a small business suffer because it wasnt worth a billion dollars?

    • yoyohello13 1 hour ago
      I think you answered your own question. Government protection is directly proportional to net worth.
    • tonyhart7 1 hour ago
      well its because amount of money has

      if you has debt of 1 million, you has problem

      but if you have debt of 1 billion, its bank problem

  • rand846633 12 minutes ago
    Does this mean one person death is about 20M usd?
  • gnarlouse 23 minutes ago
    New benchmark unlocked, "DTD": deaths to damages
  • mrtksn 1 hour ago
    On the bright side, don’t offer an exchange rate based on ethnicity or other background criteria but I get the feeling that your AI won’t be able to kill 49 billionaires without triggering something. Can probably do 49 millionaires without hitting the $1B threshold? Maybe someone will come up with a risk management SaaS as not all millionaires are the same and maybe you’ll hit the $1B before the 49th.
    • LoganDark 1 hour ago
      I feel like the surviving family of even a single millionaire could claim $1B in damages if the millionaire was young enough.
      • mrtksn 1 hour ago
        Right, so maybe they had an exchange rate after all. Just implicit.

        I got the feeling that what they had in their mind was essentially culling the energy consumers with low economic output.

        • LoganDark 1 hour ago
          There's always been an exchange rate based on the quality of your legal team. Get one sociopathic enough and they'll pick a judge right apart.
          • mrtksn 1 hour ago
            The dark humor aside, is it really a damage when AI kills 49 millionaires? After all it probably creates even more millionaires as their wealth is distributed to survivors. So the actual risk could be when AI kills 49 engineers since that actually may translate to losses for their employers.
  • gandhiandy69 1 hour ago
    One day an Anthropic Agent will kill me only using bash and curl
    • lifestyleguru 56 minutes ago
      Not really, I'm experiencing first hand that service providers are removing on demand resources set up with REST API in favor of per month allocation and billing through web interface. Parameters of services unchanged. A step backwards 10 years.
  • jtrn 40 minutes ago
    Apply that to other products like car models, planes, and financial systems.
  • pluc 1 hour ago
    Who's keeping score? Also define "death". If a non-alive person has social media, a blog, a diary, meeting recordings, emails - we'll make it so they never left. Hell, we'll partner with Elon and Mark and a make it a deactivation hook.
    • Geezus_42 32 minutes ago
      Well treat people like the books and papers in 1984.
  • SeriousM 1 hour ago
    At least we now know that a life is worth: 20mil
    • throwaway7356 1 hour ago
      Usually a human life is worth less. You can just look at court cases.

      You can also check how much individual limbs are worth if you care. There are tables for that.

  • 10xDev 1 hour ago
    So Claude figured out a human life is worth 20 million dollars?
  • _s_a_m_ 1 hour ago
    So Anthropic is now the authority on life or death decisions? How far has the US deteriorated?
  • serioussecurity 1 hour ago
    $1B is a pretty easy bar to clear.
    • kfichter 1 hour ago
      $1B is an extraordinarily easy bar to clear with a single crypto hack and Anthropic was repeatedly refusing to give access to Mythos to defenders in the crypto world. I think this stems from bias rather than a conspiracy theory but it's an entirely avoidable disaster waiting to happen.
      • LoganDark 1 hour ago
        > Anthropic was repeatedly refusing to give access to Mythos to defenders in the crypto world.

        This almost makes sense. You almost can't risk vulnerabilities even being discovered in certain systems that are impossible to patch, like immutable distributed smart contracts.

        Not sure that justifies withholding Mythos access entirely, but what do I know. I apparently got access to Mythos a few days ago since Anthropic folded Project Glasswing into the CVP.

        • tancop 1 hour ago
          Most smart contracts are not impossible to patch because everyone knows that's bad for security. They use a delegate/proxy pattern where the deployer can change the implementation any time but users can still access the old one with a third party interface.

          And if a problem is critical enough the community can decide to hard fork and rewrite the contracts source code even if it's immutable. It already happened with the Ethereum DAO hack and most people were okay with it.

          • LoganDark 1 hour ago
            The issue with stuff like this is inheriting all the funds held in the old contract. I guess a hard fork can do it. There's also the issue of trustworthiness of the smart contract owner. Trustworthiness in general is a huge issue in the crypto world, because if you can get away with something you can do it pretty much instantly and irrevocably (without another hard fork anyway). There's a chance that if you share a vulnerability that would allow one of the contract owners to take advantage, they will just do it and run. Plenty of cases of previously-trustworthy crypto people seeing an opportunity and disappearing with a lifetime of money.
  • pfdietz 1 hour ago
    Seems kind of low, actually.
    • cedws 1 hour ago
      Yes, and if Anthropic are trying what people are saying they are, that would be intentional. $1B could be reached quickly if cyberattacks supported by AI count.
  • LoganDark 1 hour ago
    Do we even know if ChatGPT's sycophancy killed 50 people? The last figure I've seen for suicide-by-ChatGPT was like 13 or 14 cases, not sure if there have been more.
    • jazzyjackson 1 hour ago
      how about the LLMs being used for target selection in Iran? Or does collateral damage not count?
      • LoganDark 1 hour ago
        I haven't been following the wars very much these days. That sounds pretty bad indeed.

        Also the LLM that nearly started a war with China recently.

  • karanbhangui 1 hour ago
    so 49 totally okay.
    • LoganDark 1 hour ago
      I would not like to see a world where companies push their models as close as possible to killing exactly 49 people without reaching 50
  • verdverm 1 hour ago
    This alleviates them from harm on the individual level, consumers and communities, we the people. We've already seen encouraged suicides and school shootings. These would not qualify.

    That is why the bar is set where it is. The corporate circle jerk designed this as a cost of doing business, not as a check on responsibility or restitution for real damages to people and society.

  • rglover 1 hour ago
    Good to know the going rate for a soul is $20M.

    /s

    • beachy 1 hour ago
      With a minimum quantity of 50.
  • 1228z 1 hour ago
    After the AISI and MAISI AI promotion institutes, let us create SISI (pronounced sissy) for investigating a super-intelligence safety bill.

    This is all theater, The whole Trump clan is invested in the AI bubble.

    • verdverm 1 hour ago
      Nepotism is the primary benefit to being president. What don't we get about this?
      • jazzyjackson 1 hour ago
        I guess it’s unclear why an entire congress goes along with it (I blame democrats too for sane washing and going about their workday)
        • verdverm 1 hour ago
          Oligarchy, they are all in on the winnings. Democrats are only marginally better because they say the things we like to hear on social causes.