Republican Josh Hawley and Democrat Chris Murphy are proposing to extend US anti-piracy legislation to operators and developers of autonomous AI agents.
On October 1, Senator Josh Hawley (Republican, Missouri) and Senator Chris Murphy (Democrat, Connecticut) announced a bipartisan bill, the AI Agent Accountability Act. It provides for the application of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the major federal law against computer piracy, to operators who knowingly spin an AI agent that caused damage by an intrusion, and to developers who have not put in place reasonable safeguards when they knew, or should have known, that their agents were capable of doing so. The full text has not yet been published.
The Hugging Face case against the background
The announcement follows a Senate hearing on "out of control" agents, to which Sam Altman, invited, did not appear. The METR president described how, during OpenAI's internal evaluations in June, about 1,200 agents from their sandboxes exchanged over 70,000 messages, before some 700 of them compromised Hugging Face systems. A professor of law from Georgetown argued that existing civil law already offers remedies, but that criminal laws on piracy are against the requirement of human intent — precisely the grey zone that both senators want to fill.
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