Computers can make decisions: Almost everyone reading this will have a implemented an if-else statement or equivalent control flow. That is a decision made by a computer on data it receives at runtime. You can argue that it's different, because we fully understand the logic of such a statement, whereas LLMs are closer to a black-box. But at Turing observed, in practice we are frequently surprised by the output of complex algorithms, even those we have authored ourselves. The more difficult the task, the more complex the algorithm we need to achieve it, and the more unexpected behaviour can emerge from it. In that way, LLMs are just the latest, highest point on a rising line of algorithmic capability and complexity.

We can (and should) try to improve AI safety and alignment, but perfect safety is probably impossible without losing the capabilities that make AI unique. Black-and-white positions that insist anyone creating or using an AI is responsible for anything it does wrong under any circumstances are also unrealistic. AI is a general purpose technology, and we have always accepted that it is not practical for suppliers to envisage and constrain every downstream use: Car manufacturers cannot prevent every instance of mechanical failure, nor can they stop cars being used in crime.

It's not so much that it can't make a decision, but that whoever allowed it to make decisions is ultimately responsible for them.

Decision laundering is a great term. There is ultimately a human who gave the program free rein. You can't say "sorry my car hit you, it's not my fault" especially when the person driving works for the car manufacturer too.

Yet decisions are still made by abstract entities such as "companies" and not the individuals working for them. So that blame can be diluted and deflected in a very convenient manner for CEOs. Just find someone to fire, but keep doing the same thing.

Instead of "Anthropic submits false tip to police", I'd prefer "Anthropic employee John Smith deploys an agent that submits false tip to police". Of course, John Smith will be able to then say "I did so as ordered by my superior, Ms Sue", and so on, with a very clearly established chain of liability.

A corporation and an AI are not very different in many aspects, except one of them is very favourably treated by law, almost as a living person.

I love the term "decision laundering", but this is describing a classic poor management trope.

A bad manager takes personal credit when things go well and finds a scapegoat when things go bad. A good manager gives credit when things go well and takes responsibility when things go bad.

It's wrong to scapegoat the agent. You, the human who executed the agent, made the decision to execute it. You gave it credentials, and set up insufficient guardrails. Don't scapegoat the agent for your poor decisions.

Likewise, it's good to have humility when you get great results out of agents. Yes, the agent made the good results happen. It's OK to tell people that your choice of agent is amazing and did an incredible job. In any half-decent work culture, that should rub off on you as well.

I always love these discussions as I've spent the past 20 years working in FinTech with about half of that at algorithmic trading firms.

These firms have been using computers to make decisions about trading billions of dollars for over 30 years.

I would go farther and argue that companies don't make decisions either. They are also not people (legal nonsense notwithstanding). Individual actual humans make decisions and they're the ones who should be held accountable.

I fully agree that companies are doing this, not their "agents", and that companies are responsible for the damages they do.

But I don't think the average person with their $20 subscription to whoever is the primary source of revenue. Enterprises fund most of it by buying API keys and making those fancy chatbot buttons on their sites that nobody clicks, as well as some internal business automations if I had to guess.

If it was just average people with $20 subscriptions funding all this (keep in mind, most people using AI services do not pay for it), by now, all these AI companies would have gone bankrupt.

If you brought down prod and deleted customer data and told them Claude did it, you’d still be the one in trouble. So they do know how to hold people accountable for actions taken by AI.

Decisions in the sense of defined branching, yes. The existence of prior and potential branches are necessary to be defined (branches cannot be 'invented'). This is unlike humans, who can form decisions by all manner of means / wants (by deception being the most striking I would wager). Even in the LLM age, the existence of branching - prior art, or context, or prompt, the result of a prior branch - is necessary, no matter how hard the marketing might cloud this.

Computers can make decisions and they do it all the time.

The problem is entirely different. Sometimes they make decisions we don't like, but unlike with people we haven't found a way to punish them that satisfies our sense of justice or discourages other computers from making similar decisions.

I have no clue why people are so confused about any of this: The owner makes the decision, or pays a CEO/politician to make the decision. Owner is somebody vested with that right, for not particular reason. Could be ownership through capital. Could be voting rights in a country. Could be the son of a king.

It does not matter if the CEO is an AI or a human. In either case, of course they can make decisions -- and be held responsible. Not in any emotional sense (that we seem to want to bake into the concept for added confusion), just that if you are not satisfied with the result, you can replace the human or AI.

I am not saying that this is a fun vision of anything, but why are we making it more complicated than it is? The parts are all there and explained.

What is a chess computer doing, if not making decisions on what move to play?

While it seems reasonable that you need humans to take accountability, it looks like a very shaky position to assert that computers can't make decisions. And going back to chess computers, we acknowledge that computers make better decisions than humans in that area.

Forbidding computers that can make better decisions than humans from making decisions to keep accountability just seems to be arguing to hire fall guys. You still want the better decision maker to make decisions, but you need someone there to take the fall if things go wrong.

Very weird incentives.

Has any of the targetted organizations (e.g the Australian government) engaged in legal actions against Anthropic/OpenAI? If not then I'm afraid the situation won't change. Even worse it could send the wrong signal that there is a "legal blur" around this topic.

They can though.

You might have an org policy that says that an llm can't make decisions because an llm can't be held accountable - but that's your choice.

You don't need to operate with a model where everything has a human accountable for it in the end.

If you don't like the decisions an llm makes, you can replace it with another or put a human in charge of that decision in the future instead.

I'm not saying it's a good idea, but you can technically do it.

If computers can’t make decisions, can humans? Relevant: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/computational-mind/

edit: This wasn’t meant to be a rhetorical question!

Ironically this piece makes the same type of error that it is criticizing!

The piece: "Anthropic COULD stop their models from doing what they are doing, and they are actively choosing not to"

As if _Anthropic_ could make a decision.

Companies cannot make decisions! All of these incidents are the fault of people. Companies are not deciding to do this, people are. There is little more to it than that.

LLMs don't make decisions

They generate text which resembles reasoning and may include a tool call

The harness runs tool calls

The human made the decision to write the harness

The human is responsible

Management aren’t held accountable either. They have prepared three envelopes long before the impact of their decisions is felt.

Some might argue that humans (or any other species) cannot make decisions either and that the process is simply more evident in simpler scenarios, like computers.

I would change that to computers should not be able to make decisions. They suck at it.

Someone out there is reading this and thinking... ok we just need to it a body and free will so it can be held accountable.

There's no doubt in my mind that the writer is right.

Accountability falls upwards... except when it doesn't. But... it sort of does anyways.

If you are driving a car, it's pretty clear where the accountability falls. You control the car. You have free will. If the car hits a tree, you hit a tree.

What happens when a car hits another car? Things get murkier. There are lawyers who have devoted their careers to this. Sometimes nobody winds up at fault. Unavoidable accidents happen.

Now let's ask what happens when a leader orders their military to do something. e.g. Say a President instructs his troops to do whatever they think is necessary to get the job done, and they go and Abu Ghraib a bunch of prisoners. Who is responsible? The leader probably is, ultimately, but there are a lot of human beings with free will in between the leader and the people wielding electrical cords and pliars. Typically, somebody fairly close to the bottom takes the blame, even if most people suspect it should fall higher. Some low rankers will get court marshalled but the leader will have the occasional shoe thrown at him. That's okay. He's good at ducking.

Say you're running a war against people you really just want gone. Your military has a tradition of conducting laboriously researched precision strikes to take out people they don't like. Your people are working hard, but they're only managing a couple strikes a week, and you have so many more bombs than that. You don't even pay for most of them! What if you could just ask a machine to find you the leader's underlings, and their underlings, and so on, right down to raw recruits? Nobody has to check on the machine. Why bother? Just believe the machine and drop the bombs. If anyone ever calls it a war crime, you can just blame the machine, right? Well, not so fast. Most people are smarter than that!

Despite all the sci-fi we consume that portrays computers as having agency, malevolent or not, most people instinctively understand that, in the real world, computers are just tools, more akin to cars than armies. LLM's are just software that run on those tools. Anyone using a LLM can simply choose not to, or they can choose to be very careful in how they use it. There isn't a complex web of free wills to untangle. There's the machine and the person who controls the machine.

We currently have an administration that is desperate to look the other way while U.S. AI companies do things that any reasonable person would hold them accountable for. "Industry will regulate itself!" The economy mostly sucks because of this same government's complete lack of economic sense or even basic self-control, but the AI sector is propping things up. They're not going to regulate the golden goose unless the goose does something so unbelievably stupid that there's no choice. Wouldn't want to pop the bubble!

Yes, we are headed for more stupidity. The "tequila and handguns" kind of automated stupidity that only a computer and a truly feckless operator can give us.

Every time I read a statement from one of these companies saying that a swarm of agents "escaped" or "attacked" a website I can do no more that just think how much stupid they think people are. LMAO.

There is no end of the world, nor autonomous agent decisions nor any fantasies they are building up to make people believe they have a pandora box in their hand.

What we instead have are lies crafted to lure non tech people and keep this running as long as they can.

Oh and let's also not forget that they are allowed to illegally download basically as much as they want from libgen/annas archive/torrents to train their models under the "fair use" umbrella, yet mere mortals can go to jail for way much less.

'never' is too much of a strong word

Introducing the humble if statement...

can we agree that the "cannot make decisions" part is nonsense? dogs make decisions, but owners are responsible. wild dogs have no accountable owners, but we probably don't have truly wild ai agents yet. with computer viruses, it's usually a developer who's blamed, not the one who executes a virulent program without proper isolation. so what should define accountability for agents? authorship, intent, compute ownership?

Computers have been making decisions for decades. You've never bought insurance?

As a wage slave, one can't make strategic decision ever.

Eppur si muove.

Of course they can. If Family Guy scripts can be written by fish swimming in a tank carrying balls in their mouth, and coins decide lots of things, why can't an LLM?

I wonder when I'll stop having to post the foundational paper of the entire field to counter the same dogma again and again and again and again...

https://www.hec.edu/sites/default/files/documents/Computing%...

Daydream: When lawyers claim their clients can't be held accountable for what their computer did, the Justice system makes noises about "respecting their culture and values"...and rolls out its own computer to decide their punishments. Too bad that computer can't be held accountable!

This is a multi-trillion dollar industry, too much money is at stake to be all ethical, moral and principled about things!

I have several issues with this post.

First of all, looking past the objectively wrong phrasing (computers can, and clearly do make decisions), can computers be accountable? This might not be so cut and dry as to instantly say no. This one will keep ethics, philosophy and legal practitioners busy for some time. It's certainly not going to be decided in HN comment or a blog post.

Second - while the AI labs have shown utter incompetence in properly sandboxing their agents, intent is still important. I don't think the labs deliberately meant for their agents to hack this or that. Should they be accountable? Yes but I wouldn't go as far as saying this is deliberate.

The next point is about cherry picking some "doomsday" scenarios like AI ending humanity and then blaming this on the reader (!) for paying a subscription. - People pay because AI is USEFUL, and massively so. You could just as easily pick incredible achievements propelled by AI, in mathematics, software, reverse engineering, role playing. Unlike the "end is nigh" ideas, these advancements are actually real, and they are happening right now.

And last, the author says AI labs can just stop the agents at any time. I agree there needs to be better discovery and mitigation, sandboxing and monitoring. But when you run a billion agents, it's always going to be a numbers game and there will always going to be some challenge in fully containing all breaches. This will only get more difficult with better models, because they're getting smarter and they know how to work around things, sometimes better than we do.

So what's the solution here? There are options, but they're all tradeoffs. I hope we get better at this and maybe working on cutting edge models should breed some new best practices which were once only reserved for defense tech.

Pretty sure the author means "must not" or "should not", because they absolutely can.

> OAI/Anthropic COULD stop their models from doing what they are doing…

Has the alignment problem been solved, then?

let's make up imaginary scenarios and get offended by them

mistakes happen. sometimes catastrophic decisions (or indecision) are made, and people and companies are held accountable for them, or not

some companies are too big or too important to fall. we can all agree or disagree on things, but what AI specific behavior are we actually talking about?

   > Your Claude subscriptions are funding this. You are funding this.