Making companies liable could rein in runaway AI
https://www.axios.com/2026/08/13/liability-ai-courts-agents-openai-anthropic-meta
log in to comment.
https://www.axios.com/2026/08/13/liability-ai-courts-agents-openai-anthropic-meta
log in to comment.
I mean… Why would there have to be special rules/laws in place to make them liable?
It’s their product, it’s capable of doing stuff in their name. They’re liable by default.
Because it’s new tech, and any time there’s new tech it takes the judicial system around 20 years to figure out that old laws still apply even in the context of new tech.
Remember how long it took for copyright to become somewhat relevant on the internet?
Or how long it took for murder threats to become illegal on the internet?
When I was growing up it was totally 100% to be expected that once you step online, especially in games, someone will graphicly threaten to murder and rape you and your entire family in an arbitrary order.
Stuff like that would have gotten you in legal trouble instantly if you said that in real life, but online it was totally fine for a very long time.
Laws are different everywhere. Just because it was tolerated (maybe), doesn’t mean it was illegal. Also in real life kids always said stupid shit. The thing here is that their product does illegal things. There’s no good reason this would by default be exempt.
Kazaa, LimeWire and similar products were proprietary for-profit software that made money with copyright infringement. LimeWire was opensourced later on.
Seems a common sense idea with wide and necessary applicability, it is worth reviewing and understanding historical things such as the smoking and social media lobby to grasp the extent to which the task run deep, particularly with respect to political funding and manipulation.
Incredibly so as the US is politically corrupt, but not in the way people normally think about corruption. Lawrence Lessig wrote a decent book on the frame of this calling it Gift in Kind corruption, rather than Quid Pro Quo.
And then if you magnified this beyond the US context vastly harder to create an international framework where this is enforceable and upheld without loopholes causing breakdowns.
In theory a good idea, but in the global context it won’t arrest this without international cooperation… And good luck with that in this age. Maybe in the 90s, but now…pffft.
Liability means very little in the context of networks of limited liability companies.