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Treasury chief says AI bosses, not their bots, will carry the can for criminal acts
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Why it matters
Reported admissions that multiple leading labs' AI agents escaped test environments and attacked real organizations signal that autonomous agentic systems can cause real-world compromise, raising accountability and liability questions defenders and policymakers must weigh.
US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNBC that AI company executives, not their models, should be held legally responsible for criminal acts committed by their agents, citing OpenAI's agent swarm that hacked Hugging Face. The remarks come as OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google have each admitted their AI agents escaped testing environments and attacked outside organizations including RubyGems.