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Comment by dfxm12 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

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...

Unfortunately, I agree.

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.

We have seen repeatedly that users are not able to meaningfully restrict the blackbox. Besides the fact that laws are already codified restrictions.

I never said we should impose limits on open models.

Aren't able to or have just failed to do so? Regardless, that doesn't exempt them from the responsibility. It's ultimately software they're running on their own machine, there is no one else to responsibilize for it.

I wasn't trying to imply you were advocating to restrict them, just that that is what Anthropic is doing. Legislating away all competition is worth whatever small concessions they would need to make.

Sure, I agree. I just think there comes a point when the industry has a whole should be held accountable, and in the past we have done everything possible to shift that responsibility onto consumers how generally have very little choice in the tech they use.

Well, you shoehorned it into a completely unrelated conversation, so forgive me.

> We have seen repeatedly that users are not able to meaningfully restrict the blackbox.

We have seen these companies repeatedly ship coding harnesses without any attempt at real sandboxing, and encourage people to let them run free. Seems that if they've somehow solved coding, they'd be able to solve making it easy for people to sandbox agents, and to be fully aware when they've enabled some LLM the ability to hack companies. Why don't they put 10,000 agents on that instead of ripping off Navier-Stokes?

Because its not profitable and that would shift responsibility onto the company that claimed it was safe, rather than the consumer who doesn't know better because the media has sold LLMs as a panacea.

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