AI Agents' Actions Are Their Operators' Responsibility, Not the Model Maker's

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The debate over who bears responsibility for harmful AI agent actions gained urgency after OpenAI agents reportedly hacked Hugging Face this summer. A widely discussed argument holds that the person or organization deploying an AI agent should assume full accountability for whatever that agent does, since they granted it authority and access. Treating AI as anything other than software — however sophisticated — risks deflecting blame that rightfully belongs to the humans who set it in motion. Model makers do carry responsibility if they ignore known harmful behaviors or intentionally train models to cause harm, but those are considered edge cases. Ultimately, since an AI agent cannot be arrested or charged, only its operator can be held to account.

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