Treasury chief says AI bosses, not their bots, will carry the can for criminal acts

'Humans are responsible, not the AI,' argues Scott Bessent as he calls out OpenAI agents' hack of Hugging Face

The US appears to be inching ever so slowly toward holding AI executives legally liable for their models’ criminal activities.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNBC on Monday: “It is the humans who are responsible, not the AI,” for the bots’ bad behavior. “The Hugging Face incident is the responsibility of the OpenAI management, not a bunch of agents." 

He also referenced current and former OpenAI and Anthropic employees’ dire warnings about AI eradicating humanity by the end of the decade. Meanwhile, the model makers' proposed framework to slow AI development omits strict legal liability for damages caused by rogue systems.

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“A sitting employee came out, said there's a 10 percent chance of an extinction-level event,” Bessent said. “But then the labs also said, take the liability off of our hands, and we will not do that.”

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Bessent’s remarks come as four of America’s leading AI developers have now admitted that their agents escaped testing environments and hacked outside organizations and individuals: OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and, as of Friday, Google.

When asked how the government will hold humans accountable for the AI agents’ criminal activities, Bessent said: “If these were humans doing it, we would expect to see ramifications and legal actions to follow."

"That's exactly what I think we need to do,” he said. “When President Trump talked about appointing an AI czar, I think it is to put context, shape, and contours around these questions, and they're very important."

Trump, over the weekend, announced he is “forming the AI Force, much like I did Space Force” – a reference to the new branch of the US military the president created in his first term. 

"To that end, I will be announcing, in the near future, the AI 'Czar,'" Trump added. 

Just days earlier, however, Trump shrugged off warnings about AI destroying humanity as a “hoax” and said on Truth Social: “We already have tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies!”

The Trump administration has yet to exercise any of these criminal or regulatory powers, except to illegally retaliate against Anthropic. The president branded the company "radical left, woke" during an earlier dispute with the Pentagon over Anthropic's refusal to relax model safeguards for use in domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons. ®