To me, it's 100% clear - if your tool use is reckless or negligent and results in a crime, then you are guilty of that crime. "It's my robot, it wasn't me" isn't a compelling defense - if you can prove that it behaved significantly outside of your informed or contracted expectations, then maybe the AI platform or the Robot developer could be at fault. Given the current state of AI, though, I think it's not unreasonable to expect that any bot can go rogue, that huge and trivially accessible jailbreak risks exist, so there's no excuse for deploying an agent onto the public internet to do whatever it wants outside direct human supervision. If you're running moltbot or whatever, you're responsible for what happens, even if the AI decided the best way to get money was to hack the Federal Reserve and assign a trillion dollars to an account in your name. Or if Grok goes mechahitler and orders a singing telegram to Will Stancil's house, or something. These are tools; complex, complicated, unpredictable tools that need skillfull and careful use.
There was a notorious dark web bot case where someone created a bot that autonomously went onto the dark web and purchased numerous illicit items.
https://wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.bitnik.or...
They bought some ecstasy, a hungarian passport, and random other items from Agora.
>The day after they took down the exhibition showcasing the items their bot had bought, the Swiss police “arrested” the robot, seized the computer, and confiscated the items it had purchased. “It seems, the purpose of the confiscation is to impede an endangerment of third parties through the drugs exhibited, by destroying them,” someone from !Mediengruppe Bitnik wrote on their blog.
In April, however, the bot was released along with everything it had purchased, except the ecstasy, and the artists were cleared of any wrongdoing. But the arrest had many wondering just where the line gets drawn between human and computer culpability.
