HackerNews doesn't get charged for DoS'ing under-provisioned web servers either. As others have said, there must be a line between hack attempts and accidents.
If HackerNews launched a DoS attack against a web server, I'm sure they'd get charged.
But a news aggregator site is not DDoS-ing.
But, for example, OAI said they fed their AI random websites and told it to interact with them however it wanted. One was a police report website and it submitted a false police report. That's as knowingly negligent as you can get