except it is possibly a grey area, the contracts are written such that extracting the money is only possible if you fulfill the contract, if you find a loophole and fullfill the contract and take the money did you really steal it?
With the usual caveats (IANAL, this may vary per country/jurisdiction) laws and contracts are usually about intent, not pure semantics. And you'd probably have a hard time to argue that this way of 'fulfilling' the contract was the intended way.
I understand that contracts are usually written this way but an ethereum smart contract is a different kettle of fish. It is written to be a program so if you can get the program to respond to your inputs then you have fulfilled the requirements of the smart contract as it was written. Of course it may be that it was poorly worded but that is an issue for the contract writer.
Because whoever invented them called them "smart contracts" doesn't mean they're considered as such in the jurisdiction where people using the said "smart contract" are living. Matt Levine has written extensively about the subject.
