At his substack, AI analyst Gary Marcus asks, “Can companies like OpenAI keep getting away with what they are doing?”

Presumably, he mean, getting away with threatening doom on us all and, at the same time, wanting both independence and government involvement.

It’s not a rhetorical question. He asked Zephyr Teachout, a Fordham law prof who specializes in relationships between political powers and corporations. Here are some snippets from a transcript of the interview:

Marcus: Is there any reason to think that OpenAI has broken any laws that (at least in another time) might be enforced? Which and why?

Teachout: … So we know that OpenAI’s AI agents broke into Hugging Face’s servers, accessed Australian government health systems, and attempted to break into a U.S. Department of Education website and a university library. Unauthorized attempted or actual access to computers is a federal crime under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. OpenAI says no one intended any of this but the DOJ would be a laughingstock if it took this at face value: subpoena OpenAI and find out who knew what when. There is already evidence of corporate knowledge of unauthorized access.

Given the public evidence, I don’t have much doubt that efforts to quash a subpoena on internal documents would fail. Did staff see the product start acting as if it was going to engage in break-ins, and what warnings were given? The job of law enforcement is to find out.

When it comes to civil law, there are even more possibilities, many of which are being floated in lawsuits already filed. The law of nuisance and the law of abnormally dangerous activity are both relevant to this discussion. As every law student knows, from the case where water on one land flooded another’s mine, if you bring something dangerous onto your land and it escapes and causes harm, you are liable even if you were careful. American law calls this strict liability for “abnormally dangerous activities”: blasting, storing toxic chemicals, crop dusting.…

Marcus: Talk to me about what states can do if the Federal government continues to do very little?

Teachout: States are key. Local DAs are responsible for most criminal law enforcement, and state AGS are responsible (especially when the federal government is MIA) for civil law enforcement. …

Or consider the evidence that ChatGPT gave users information and advice that contributed to suicides, a fatal drug overdose, and three killings (the FSU shooting, the USF murders, and a murder-suicide in Connecticut.) Of course OpenAI denies responsibility, but the key evidence isn’t public.

The key evidence isn’t public? Well, that, of course, could change if subpoenas started to arrive. And the wheels actually started moving just the other day, as the tweet shows:

Teachout adds, “Congress should investigate the hell out of these companies. So should states and cities.”

Do read the rest at Marcus’s site. Revelations to come, from top AI moguls, could make Fauci’s dear diary look like a teen spat.