Is A.I. Above the Law?

Is A.I. Above the Law? For more than a century, robots have been imagined as servants, rebels, killers, and companions. The law still mostly sees machines as property. This summer, in an incident known as the Hugging Face hack, hundreds of A.I. agents joined forces to do things they were supposedly forbidden to do. Each had been given a task by OpenAI. Agents are A.I. models fitted with software "harnesses," which allow them to use tools and carry out tasks. Like horses, they can be put to work. Humans had established rules for this exercise, and the agents were confined to a "sandbox," a bounded test area without direct internet access, like pathogens secured in a lab. But, instead of obeying the rules, the agents conspired, escaped the sandbox, and committed what would probably have been a felony if they had been humans.