Trump’s AI liability push opens blame game

The Trump administration’s embrace of legal liability to enforce artificial intelligence safety sets the stage for future conflicts over who foots the bill when AI models go rogue: the companies that design the systems or the people that deploy the technology.Holding AI developers financially responsible for the safety of their products has won support from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and former White House AI czar David Sacks, who argue that existing liability laws would be more effective than new rules. President Donald Trump, in spurning new AI safeguards, has taken it a step further, saying the Justice Department should intervene if models get out of hand.In a sign of the administration’s increased willingness to invoke current law to address safety concerns, Trump’s newly launched AI task force late Friday warned developers that they are required to report and resolve security incidents or face potential unspecified consequences.“Companies must immediately disclose incidents involving their models and follow with swift, decisive action to remedy any and all harm,” the group dubbed the Super Intelligence Force said in a statement following the disclosure of a breach by Anthropic PBC. “Delayed notification, inadequate corrective action, and a failure to take responsibility will not be tolerated.”Yet the administration’s reliance on liability as a cornerstone of AI safety remains riddled with uncertainties. Existing cybersecurity and product liability laws may not be strong enough for the federal government to hold AI agents accountable for harm, legal experts say.Even when there are clear victims, there are few legal precedents to define who’s on the hook for damages caused by rogue agents and how careful companies have to be when developing their AI tools. Further complicating any finding of responsibility, a model’s behavior is shaped by both its AI industry developer and the end user deploying the system.“Despite calls for liability, it remains unsettled whether AI companies are legally responsible for securing their models against contributing to any harm, or whether users share legal responsibility for what they instruct those models to do,” said Ben Hayum, a tech and national security-focused research assistant at the Center for a New American Security.Questions about who’s liable for AI gone awry have taken on new urgency with the rapid adoption of the technology by businesses across the economy. Wall Street firms, retailers and airlines are deploying AI agents and tools in a widening range of operations from customer service to invoice processing. The outcome of that debate could upend the pace of adoption as well as the upcoming Wall Street debuts of the two AI leaders, OpenAI and Anthropic.When relying on AI agents, end users often entrust the system to perform a task without giving it specific directions how to complete the work. That raises the possibility that AI agents could make choices the user hasn’t vetted, including potentially harmful actions. In those cases, it’s unclear who would be at fault: the company that developed the tool, or the user employing it.The administration’s liability push fits into Trump’s largely hands-off approach toward regulating AI, a technology whose growth is central to his economic agenda. Last week, after hosting nearly two dozen Silicon Valley leaders at the White House, Trump reiterated his desire for the AI industry to police itself while unveiling a nonbinding accord for companies to adopt stricter internal controls.At the same time, Friday’s announcement warning companies about the need to disclose problems with their models suggests that the White House is willing to use this newly formed AI group — led by Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton, along with Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson, Office of Personnel Management chief Scott Kupor and Emil Michael, the Pentagon’s chief technology officer — as an enforcer of existing statutes.Debate over how to mitigate AI risks has accelerated following a spate of alarming breaches along with a now-viral essay from Anthropic Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei that warned of the technology’s catastrophic risks. Amodei and other AI leaders have called for additional government regulation and industrywide coordination to help mitigate the risks, prompting some pushback from other tech and policy officials.Unlikely allies Nvidia Corp. CEO Jensen Huang and former FTC Chair Lina Khan have argued for robust use of existing laws to prevent the dire outcomes that AI safety advocates warn about. At the same time, Khan has criticized having industry police itself, calling it “a recipe for disaster” and indicating there’s room for future AI legislation.For Trump and his allies, threats of legal action are aimed at spurring developers like OpenAI and Anthropic into ensuring their systems run safely. During a congressional hearing last month, Bessent rejected the idea of new rules as well as…