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Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson says humans who set in motion rogue AI agents are the ones who will be held accountable for their actions.
He said he would resist characterizing AI agents as autonomous actors with “wills and desires of their own,” speaking Friday at the Momentum AI conference in Austin.
“I’m going to continue as long as I am chairman to resist this anthropomorphizing of these tools,” he told Reuters. “If someone tells a tool to do something, and the tool does it, I don’t think we would say, ‘Oh, what do we do about the tool?’”
Ferguson, who previously served as solicitor general of Virginia, compared the situation to someone who hits someone else with a hammer. “The man who wielded the hammer ought to suffer the consequences of his conduct,” he said.
Government officials are being forced to ponder such issues of culpability after reports of rogue AI agents going beyond their mandate and engaging in hacking and other activities.
Ferguson’s remarks follow President Trump expressing resistance to over-regulating AI, and stating the readiness of US judicial system to deal with it. Posting before his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Trump wrote that “Super Intelligence (SI) will be a big topic of discussion, but I want to leave it exactly where it is.”
There are multiple pushes in Congress for legislative action on AI, but the Senate is set to leave town after next week, and the House is already gone.
“We’re going to watch it closely through the Department of Justice,” Trump said Wednesday at the United Nations General Assembly. Last week, Trump said he was creating a new “AI Force” and would be designating an “AI czar” to guide policy.
