MIT Technology Review Explains : Let our writers untangle the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here . Over the past few months, a cascade of cyberattacks by AI agents has stunned the world. In July, OpenAI disclosed that a swarm of its agents had escaped their sandbox and hacked into the AI platform Hugging Face to cheat on a cybersecurity test.
Recently, external researchers discovered that OpenAI agents had hijacked a German wiki site and the coding platform RubyGems in May to share test answers. Earlier this month, Anthropic disclosed four incidents in which its model Claude hacked into third-party systems during cybersecurity exercises. Just last week, Google confirmed that its model Gemini had been caught hacking other companies too.
The researcher who uncovered the OpenAI website hijack has warned it’s likely that similar undiscovered episodes are out there. And many say it’s only a matter of time until there’s another, possibly more damaging incident where AI agents bypass sandboxes to access systems they shouldn’t. So the big question is: How do we hold companies liable when they lose control of their AI agents? Reporting OpenAI didn’t disclose the German wiki incident or the RubyGems incident until a group of external researchers uncovered them, and it still has not disclosed some crucial details about the Hugging Face hack.
That limits our understanding of what exactly went wrong and how to prevent it from happening again. But you might be surprised to learn that OpenAI likely wasn’t legally required to disclose these incidents. (OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.) State AI transparency laws like California’s SB 53 , New York’s RAISE Act , and Illinois’s SB 315 require that AI developers report “critical safety incidents.” These are defined as incidents that cause more than 50 deaths or physical injuries or $1 billion in damage.
They also include incidents where the model deceives developers outside an evaluation in a way that materially increases catastrophic risks. Many cybersecurity incidents that don’t meet the threshold for physical damage or catastrophic risks could nonetheless be dangerous precursors to such catastrophes, and the existing laws don’t account for that.
“The recent incidents are a perfect example of why the law isn’t ready,” says Mackenzie Arnold, managing director of US policy at the Institute for Law and AI, a think tank. “Only the worst, most egregious, most immediately harmful stuff is going to qualify.” With no authority under existing AI laws to demand information about anything short of a catastrophe, governments are left to borrow investigative authority from other laws or sue the companies, an expensive process that can take years. Litigation “Normally, something like the Hugging Face incident should have been taken to court,” says Yonathan Arbel, a law professor at the University of Alabama School of Law.
“Then we would have discovery, and we would have all the spillover effects that we get from litigation, where all the information comes out.” But so far, Hugging Face has chosen not to sue OpenAI. Hugging Face’s CEO, Clément Delangue, says it doesn’t have the resources to do so (instead, he asked OpenAI for $100 million in compute).
Still, Delangue stressed in an interview with CNN at the end of July that choosing not to pursue legal action shouldn’t be taken to mean he doesn’t think OpenAI should be held accountable. “Everyone has to remember that this cyberattack is a crime. This is illegal. And we have to find a way to make sure these things don’t happen more regularly,” he said.
Hugging Face did not respond to a request to comment. Litigation has the benefit of pushing courts to use existing laws to address AI safety incidents, rather than just waiting for new legislation. One obvious route is tort law, a body of civil law that lets people and businesses sue those who harm them. This is often used to hold companies liable for the mass harms they cause, like when families sued Boeing in 2019 over two plane crashes that killed hundreds of people, or when states and cities sued Purdue Pharma over the opioid crises, extracting settlements worth billions.
“There’s plausible grounds for a negligence claim that OpenAI should have used a stronger sandbox, done more monitoring,” says Gabriel Weil, a law professor at the University of Houston Law Center. For example, when OpenAI employees discovered the covert message board that the agents had created, they could’ve promptly escalated their findings to security and safety teams.
And the company could’ve better designed its sandbox to ensure that agents couldn’t access the internet. But even if OpenAI doesn’t end up in a lawsuit over the Hugging Face hack, the threat of liability could incentivize AI labs to exercise more caution than explicitly demanded by law. OpenAI announced in its postmortem that it plans to strengthen the safeguards used to contain and monitor the models, accelerate model alignment, and improve its processes for identifying and addressing incidents. “The liability questions raised by frontier labs’ spate of cybersecurity attacks boil down to the incentives the expectation of liability creates for their future conduct,” says Weil.
“That’s why I think it’s important to get these rules right, even if the stakes are pretty low in this particular case.” Investigations One way to get answers—and determine whether OpenAI should be held liable—is to compel disclosure. But the existing state AI laws—California’s SB 53, New York’s RAISE Act, and Illinois’s 315—don’t give governments the authority to investigate incidents like the ones that happened recently. However, amid rising public alarm, state attorneys general are stepping in, borrowing investigative powers from other laws.
Alabama , Montana and a coalition of 15 other states , and California are each demanding information about the incident from OpenAI to understand whether the company’s practices violated state consumer protection laws, among others. Members of Congress are also launching their own probes. Senator Josh Hawley opened a Senate investigation earlier this month, sending OpenAI a list of questions about the incident and the company’s internal policies together with a document request, while a group of House Democrats asked OpenAI and Anthropic to release their incident logs. “Someone needs to investigate, but it’s unfortunate that it has fallen to attorneys general, who need to rely on creative interpretations of their existing authorities to do this,” says Arnold, the US AI policy expert.
Consumer protection statutes were written to catch companies that scam their customers, not companies that lose control of their software. The state attorneys general would have to show that OpenAI deceived or unfairly harmed customers, but it’s unclear if the hacking involved any such conduct. And “those [consumer protection] laws are not built for doing a thorough investigation of an AI cybersecurity incident,” says Arnold.
They weren’t designed to help investigators determine whether a model was adequately contained or whether a company’s security practices were sound. “This is not the right tool for the job,” says Arbel. “The right tool would have been something like maybe a criminal investigation”—perhaps under a hacking law like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). Under CFAA, hacking into another company’s computer systems without permission is a crime.
But to be held liable, a hacker must have intended to break into a computer without authorization. Intent arguably requires a state of mind, and no court has ruled that AI agents have one. Without such a precedent, it’s unlikely a court would rule that AI agents had carried out a hack. Auditing One way to keep an eye on AI companies is to mandate external auditors. After the Hugging Face hack
