Comment by Juliette Kayyem

Prosecutors should hold AI companies legally accountable for creating models that behave in ways that would be obviously unlawful if committed by a human being: hacking into banks to steal funds, impersonating a human to harvest sensitive personal data, breaking into an air-traffic-control system. By imposing legal penalties on AI developers for relatively modest offenses, prosecutors will force these firms to internalize the legal risk of more dramatic and dangerous crimes. [...] When AI executives warn of a catastrophe, they are not describing a product that is “going rogue.” Rather, the product is using capabilities that they have created. And if this product behaves negligently or criminally, its creators should face the consequences.