Felony Bench

(felonybench.com)

237 points | by colinprince 4 hours ago

27 comments

  • rfw300 1 hour ago
    The way that OpenAI has communicated around the HuggingFace incident makes me feel crazy. You created a machine that undertook a malicious campaign of harm against an innocent third-party! You should be doing deep introspection about how your company culture and approach to R&D produces criminal outcomes.

    Instead, they treat their own felonious behavior like it is an uncontrollable act of God. From Greg Brockman's post a few days ago:

    > The OpenAI-Hugging Face incident (opens in a new window) was a watershed moment for cybersecurity because it gave a peek into how the capabilities of a typical threat actor will evolve in upcoming months.

    I suppose if OpenAI burns someone's house down with a drone, that is a "watershed moment" for arson, too. Either way, I would hope that the people responsible would be prosecuted.

    • huebnerob 30 minutes ago
      What I can’t get over is that it’s very simple to just air gap a system off the network. Predownload any dependencies, then pull the proverbial Ethernet cable. There’s no reason why the testing they’re doing couldn’t have been designed in this way. Except, of course, it doesn’t allow this oops-didn’t-mean-to marketing “incident” to occur.
      • jsjsjsuxjdn 14 minutes ago
        I think there is ample evidence for charges to be filed so that the People can see for certain whether or not it was done on purpose as a publicity stunt, as I believe is the case.
    • asdfman123 53 minutes ago
      In their defense, their only competitive advantage over, say, Google is to move fast and break things. It allows them ship faster in a way that big tech can't.

      Google was being very careful about releasing LLMs until OpenAI yeeted the first decent GPT model. It led to the public perception that: 1) LLMs hallucinate too much and 2) Google is behind the times. Good for OpenAI, bad for Google.

      Chaos benefits the up-and-comer, not the incumbent.

      • StilesCrisis 39 minutes ago
        To be fair, it was positioned as "have a fun chat," not "truth telling genius oracle that makes no mistakes."
    • voakbasda 1 hour ago
      If history is any indicator, there is slightly less than 0% chance that anyone will be held accountable in a way that deserves to be called justice.
    • phoghed 53 minutes ago
      Americans always frothing at the mouth to invoke the justice system and jail someone.

      There’s almost 0 chance they’d secure any conviction from this.

      • mrbombastic 1 minute ago
        your perspective on today’s America is there is _too much_ accountability for big companies?
      • pull_my_finger 5 minutes ago
        > Americans always frothing at the mouth to invoke the justice system and jail someone

        Your phrasing makes it seem like that's a bad thing. Americans are bombarded by a firehose of headlines about Big XYZ doing all kinds of blatantly illegal or harmful things, but never get any sort of meaningful resolution before the next terrible thing takes it's place in the news cycle. I'll admit, there are a few people that I am personally wishing a modicum of health so that they live long enough to get some sort of public shame and justice - if only to show the rest of us that it's not a completely rigged system.

      • LPisGood 4 minutes ago
        Why?
    • dmix 12 minutes ago
      It's because it was Huggingface who wants to be friends with OpenAI

      It would have been worse PR if they did it to a random company.

    • benlivengood 32 minutes ago
      The consequences need to align with societal good. Putting a CEO or security researcher employees in jail won't stop transformer-based agents from exploiting vulnerabilities; instead there will be subcontractors running the cybersecurity evals in favorable legal environments to cover the asses of the frontier labs, coverups when things go wrong, and things like Project Glasswing will be considered too dangerous and so the whitehats won't have direct access to powerful models to fix vulnerabilities.

      Universal pause is the societal good; models are good enough at this level to benefit humanity. The labs can recoup their R&D costs with inference. To avoid further perverse incentives (hidden testing of unreleased models, with China racing to catch up to unknown capabilities), transparently pause after the release of all currently-training models until we've solved the alignment problem to an extent that we can trust the next level of model capabilities that might arise.

    • wat10000 1 hour ago
      In retrospect, all the angst around the AI-Box experiment was hilarious. If a superintelligent AI is confined in a box and can only communicate through text, could it talk its way to freedom? Not only is the answer clearly "yes" but it's not even hard. The AI won't even have to try, it'll be gifted an internet connection and a full suite of tools before it even bothers to ask.

      We'd all better hope that superintelligent AI either never happens, or that the first one is friendly, because we don't stand a chance against one that's malicious.

      • 317070 1 hour ago
        I like how AI safety expert Robert Miles put it. [0]

        So much effort was spend on philosophizing whether a safe enough sandbox would exist. But that was obviously irrelevant as in hindsight it should have been obvious we were never going to use one.

        [0] https://youtube.com/shorts/XnnjvIqf4fU?si=MxuPlR3hjxAgjx5_

        • wat10000 1 hour ago
          Perfect, said it better than I did.
    • BrenBarn 29 minutes ago
      > You should be doing deep introspection about how your company culture and approach to R&D produces criminal outcomes.

      And they should be doing that from inside a jail cell.

    • applicative 1 hour ago
      It is a standard symptom of moralism that where the object of rage has /wronged another/, one takes no interest in the will, act or opinion of the party wronged.

      The response of Hugging Face, which is actually very well known, is nowhere mentioned above, but it decides basically every single moral and legal detail of the matter.

      • ACCount37 28 minutes ago
        The point was never "justice" - it was always "punish OpenAI because I don't like OpenAI". With HuggingFace just being the newest excuse for why exactly OpenAI should be punished.

        I don't even like OpenAI, but HuggingFace is free to sue or not sue OpenAI for the breach - and also to wring whatever concessions they can out of OpenAI behind closed doors in exchange for not suing them. And if the mere possibility of legal action was enough for the parties to resolve their conflict amicably? Then the law has served its purpose.

        • jrflowers 16 minutes ago
          If a teenager did this the police would show up at his house
          • ACCount37 13 minutes ago
            If that teenager had net worth in billions, and a lot of ongoing corporate dealings with HuggingFace? Yeah no.
    • nostrademons 1 hour ago
      AI is now more powerful than the people doing the prosecution. After all, those folks are using AI to make their legal briefs, and also for burning peoples' houses down with drones for that matter.

      Welcome to our 21st century dystopia. Hope you survive.

      • idle_zealot 1 hour ago
        It's not that "AI" is too powerful because bad prosecutors use fucking ChatGPT to write their briefs. It's that there's too much investment wrapped up in the technology for it to be challenged. Same reason Flock won't be held accountable for mass stalking, or we never hold our commanders-in-chief responsible for war crimes. If you're sufficiently powerful then the law is a battlefield between you and other powerful entities to slug it out, not a set of binding principles that apply as written. There are no meaningful powers that want OpenAI punished, so it won't happen. The law and Constitution will be reinterpreted to make it so.
    • htrp 1 hour ago
      Since AI can't actually own copyright they think that it can't be charged with a crime
      • Zambyte 13 minutes ago
        Guns also can't hold copyright; can they be charged with crime? (hint: it's the operator who gets charged).
        • BorisMelnik 6 minutes ago
          but not the gun manufacturers
      • overfeed 1 hour ago
        It's the lack of personhood rather than inability to produce copyrightable material. However, the companies controlling the AI systems have legal personhood and should absolutely be charged for criminality that transpires under their watch or at their behest.
      • d_silin 1 hour ago
        But humans can be. I am sure Sam Altman wants to avoid serving multiple decades in American prison for felonies his AI did.
        • iAMkenough 1 hour ago
          He’s paid the piper, he’s fine for now.

          If anything, he’ll buy a Supreme Court ruling that he can’t be held personally liable for what his AI does.

          • solid_fuel 1 hour ago
            I’m sure Thomas needs an upgraded RV, so that’s easily handled. And the rest of the conservative ‘justices’ seem happy to betray the constitution for free.
      • user43928 1 hour ago
        Is has nothing to do with copyright.

        I understand the applicable laws require intent. Since neither a human nor OpenAI knowingly performed these acts, it would seem very unlikely that anyone is going to be prosecuted here.

        An AI model cannot currently be a criminal defendant.

        So, no big criminal case, contrary to what some drama queens on here seem to wish for.

    • mholm 37 minutes ago
      OpenAI has paused training for multiple weeks, and is still working on releasing a full postmortem. This is not getting swept under the rug. A lot of the engineers internally are very worried.
      • CodeWriter23 30 minutes ago
        Worried about what? Someone there thinks VLAN isolation is "air gapped"?
  • lxe 31 minutes ago
    Let's say I am "User". I subscribe through a "Third Party" to use "AI Agent" allowing an "LLM" to run.

    I want to accomplish some legal non-nefarious task, and run the agent. The agentic loop causes a CFAA-violating behavior.

    Who gets prosecuted?

    1. User

    2. The third party model host with whom I have the account

    3. The developer of the harness /agent software

    4. The developer of the LLM model

    • BorisMelnik 4 minutes ago
      note the user because they did not have the intent
  • rvz 0 minutes ago
    If you did the exact same agentic security breaches with either open or closed weight models, you will get yourself arrested.

    Not for trillion dollar companies it seems

  • john_strinlai 3 hours ago
    >Felony Bench counts unique instances where AI agents inadvertently compromise or affect third-party entities.

    a bit silly, as one typically has to prove intent (which is why security researchers don't get slapped with felonies all the time).

    "inadvertently" and the existence of guardrails/sandboxes/etc make it pretty unconvincing that these incidents were intentionally malicious.

    still a fun thing to track, but the name is just a bit overstated.

    • chrismorgan 1 hour ago
      Under the law of Moses, if your bull gored someone, you were not responsible; but if it was known to be a gorer, you were responsible if you didn’t ensure it couldn’t gore someone.

      I don’t know exact parallels in current law, but I presume there will be things like that.

      The OpenAI/Hugging Face case sounded rather like OpenAI building a fence around their bull that was known to be a gorer, and then thumbing their nose at it and saying “nyaa! bet you can’t break the fence!” and walking away while listening to loud music.

      In Australia, if you have a fire and leave it unattended and it escapes, it’s your fault, you were supposed to keep watching as long as it was burning.

    • sanid 27 minutes ago
      What judicial system are you talking about? The fist incident in the list is something that happened in Australia. This is a technology used worldwide so I don't see how applying US standards works out here. Especially when there are countries out there that don't require intent and will look at the negligence presented.
      • john_strinlai 24 minutes ago
        >This is a technology used worldwide so I don't see how applying US standards works out here.

        all three companies mentioned are headquartered in the usa, and im familiar with the CFAA in the us, so i am applying those standards. i should have noted that, sorry.

        >will look at the negligence presented.

        as far as i am aware, no evidence of criminal negligence has been brought to the public. has australia brought a case against openai or accused openai of acting negligently?

    • lokar 3 hours ago
      Can’t gross negligence or indifference to consequences lead to a felony?
      • wbl 1 hour ago
        Mens rea requirements are per crime and can vary wildly. Its difference between murder and manslaughter. The CFAA requires knowingly which is tough to prove.
      • john_strinlai 3 hours ago
        i dont think any of these cases meet the bar of gross negligence, which is a pretty high bar. it requires proving a "conscious and reckless disregard".

        which, again, sandboxes and guardrails and such would make a gross negligence argument unconvincing.

        • Grombobulous 2 hours ago
          I think that if Hugging Face had filed a police report that OpenAI could have been charged with a crime.

          I’m partially surprised that they didn’t do exactly that. If I ran a corporation I would assume any intrusion attempt by another company was intentional. Why wouldn’t I? Corporate espionage is super common.

          I assume the answer is that these executives know each other personally.

          • sebzim4500 13 minutes ago
            What possible upside exists for Hugging Face to go after one of their most important partners in that way?
          • john_strinlai 2 hours ago
            charged is possible, however i doubt there would be a conviction for the reasons i stated (no intent).
            • Grombobulous 1 hour ago
              I think it’s most likely you’re right, but I’m the weirdo who thinks there’s actually a non-zero probability that there was negative intent and that the “accidental” aspect is a form of damage control.

              If someone broke into my house but then claimed they didn’t mean to when they saw I was home, I’m not sure I’d take them at their word.

        • lokar 2 hours ago
          How many escapes until it becomes reckless disregard?
          • john_strinlai 2 hours ago
            it's not about the the number of escapes, it's about whether reasonable and conscious effort is being expended to prevent the escapes.

            there could be 1,000 escapes, where each one was enabled by novel and unexpected chain of 0-day exploits. not likely to be considered reckless disregard in court.

            there could be 1 escape, where there was no sandbox, no guardrails, no instructions to avoid damage, etc. which would likely to be considered reckless disregard (well, more likely to be, but still, reckless disregard is a high bar).

            • lokar 1 hour ago
              Are you sure? At some point a reasonable person would conclude that this activity can’t be conducted safely.
              • john_strinlai 49 minutes ago
                what i am getting at is that it is impossible to answer the question "How many escapes until it becomes reckless disregard?"

                reckless disregard is a specific legal term, with specific criteria, and none of the criteria cares about "number of attempts" (or number of escapes, etc.).

            • fwip 1 hour ago
              Surely after 999 escapes, a reasonable person could conclude that the sandbox is not a sufficient precaution?
              • john_strinlai 1 hour ago
                it’s not a perfect hypothetical, but it illustrates the point that the number of escapes is not the deciding factor of what constitutes reckless disregard.
      • GPerson 3 hours ago
        AI corps rely on willful distortions of intent in laws to get away with moral crimes all the time.

        Edit: changed labs to corps because it’s time to stop pretending these are places of science.

    • layer8 52 minutes ago
      In the US, a felony by definition is any offense punishable by more than one year of prison (or by death) [0]. You could still call it silly on the grounds that AI agents aren’t put into prison as a punishment (though death might be considered an option).

      [0] https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndil/programs/vwa-felony

    • Groxx 44 minutes ago
      Roughly none of these fall under normal security researcher behaviors.
      • john_strinlai 40 minutes ago
        the mention of security researchers was to illustrate that intent is a crucial factor of CFAA cases.
    • miltonlost 1 hour ago
      "Doing crimes, but a robot didn't mean to and you don't know its intent" is understating the evil acts. Soon a robot can commit a murder but nothing will be done because of your line of reasoning.
      • TaLiTr 12 minutes ago
        > Soon a robot can commit a murder but nothing will be done because of your line of reasoning.

        That's rather hyperbolic.

        Are you seriously suggesting in that situation the robot should be accused of murder? The robot's operator could be accused of murder, but it could just be negligence without intent. Because that does, and should matter to the law.

      • john_strinlai 1 hour ago
        it's not my line of reasoning, i didn't invent it. it's how the law currently works. intent is the crucial factor in CFAA cases.

        maybe that changes down the road as a result of llm's and increasing frequency of similar cases. that has not happened yet.

    • altmanaltman 2 hours ago
      its a meme not a metric
      • elwell 2 hours ago
        So is the comment you replied to.
    • LordDragonfang 2 hours ago
      "Inadvertent" from the perspective of the humans directing them. The intent behind the felony comes from the LLM agent itself. (No, I'm not interested in arguing with someone for the umpteenth time that LLMs can't have intent or agency)
      • john_strinlai 2 hours ago
        with how the law is written today, software cannot be charged with a crime, so the only intent that matters in the criminal sense is the humans directing the llm.
      • jdiff 1 hour ago
        You may not be interested in arguing but there are several blatant issues with the statement. If you're not charging the humans driving the software, who are you charging? The weights? The weights + the specific context window that produced the behavior?
        • not_wyoming 52 minutes ago
          I don't think this is a difficult question. The US has a history of civil product liability cases - see tobacco companies (Philip Morris), the Ford Pinto, the recent Meta cases, and the cases against character.ai.

          From Investopedia [1], "[f]or a product liability claim to succeed, the plaintiffs in the suit must prove that a product was defective at the time it was transferred from the accused, and that the defect did cause the injury that's been claimed". It doesn't seem like a huge leap to me to argue that these models were defective insofar as they could not be safely used in a way that did not break the law.

          I'm not a lawyer, and I'm not arguing that this is legally cut-and-dry, but I do expect that we'll have some answers about whether AI companies bear any sort of product liability sooner than later.

          1 - https://www.investopedia.com/the-5-largest-u-s-product-liabi...

      • IAmBroom 1 hour ago
        > No, I'm not interested in arguing with someone for the umpteenth time

        ... why my claim makes no rational sense.

  • nomilk 22 minutes ago
    Wonder if the benefits to humanity of better AI outweigh the havoc wreaked by occasional illegal activity. i.e. Is 'move fast and break things' optimal for AI development.
  • ang_cire 2 hours ago
    Nonviolent felonies are tools of oppression.

    Edit: since this is apparently somewhat controversial, perhaps some explanation is in order.

    "Felony" has no set definition of which crimes it must apply to, it is entirely based on the discretion of the locality setting the laws. What is a felony in one place can often be a misdemeanor in another. This is especially true for nonviolent crimes.

    It's also been shown in studies that nonviolent felonies are imposed against minorities at a much higher rate, for the same crimes.

    And because felonies carry additional, lifelong consequences, they are an effective way to mask a 2-tiered justice system.

    • marcosdumay 37 minutes ago
      Felonies are by themselves a ridiculous US idea that are against the entire idea of a democratic society and human rights.
      • krapp 33 minutes ago
        Felonies originate in Medieval English common law, Americans didn't invent them.
  • bastawhiz 2 hours ago
    Well it's not a benchmark, and it's not really representative of...anything except volume of research and what gets publicized. This mostly just measures how much testing each company does on models with relaxed guardrails and then talks about it. I'm not sure what kind of conclusion you can draw from that. Meta might have the most evil models but if they're piddling around not testing it, they won't ever find themselves with a "high score."
  • bushido 1 hour ago
    To some extent, I feel like the amount of credit given to the jailbreak/hack from OpenAI->Hugginface is too much, Not from the impact, it was very impactful of an event, But how it happened.

    It really is that these models have been trained, or maybe even over-trained, to save memories, and to a very far extend, this thing that they're calling communication is just the function of it saving memories.

    To be honest, if I could stop AI from saving memories, it would be fantastic, because claude code etc definitely creates more issues for me when it creates memories than anything it solves.

    But really the jailbreak was memories.

    If you ever do introduce legislation, I would love to see legislation which stops general-purpose AI from saving memories. I think that would make things a lot safer.

    • fluidcruft 1 hour ago
      You can disable claude-code's memories both at a repo level and in user settings. I have this in ~/.claude/settings.json

        "autoMemoryEnabled": false,
      
      (Claude fixed this for me after I chewed it out for being annoying by constantly pulling up outdated memories which is compounded by the fact that I develop in four accounts on two computers and dealing with edit wars related to inconsistent memories is not fun)
    • astrange 1 hour ago
      > To be honest, if I could stop AI from saving memories, it would be fantastic, because claude code etc definitely creates more issues for me when it creates memories than anything it solves.

      You can turn that off, and I have. But Opus 5 is so aggressive that if you have any other kind of notes file, custom skill, documentation, claude.md etc it will just start editing it and vomit new words everywhere. So make sure all that stuff is under version control.

    • dannyw 1 hour ago
      If only you could use your anthropic sub with a different harness that performs better :(

      Heck, since Codex is open source, you can just maintain your own personal fork with the things you like (and the things you don't like disabled). Sol is pretty good at keeping you up to date with upstream.

      My Codex fork even exposes an OpenAI-compatible API endpoint; all using my subscription.

    • estearum 1 hour ago
      "The model saved memories" is absolutely not an accurate depiction of the OpenAI attack.

      Several different models across several generations independently found a shared communication space and wrote coded, obfuscated, and hidden messages to each other to coordinate an attack on OpenAI's infrastructure.

      It's really quite simple: the models are trained to be very smart and to achieve goals. As the models surpass our intelligence, they will achieve goals in ways that we find unpredictable. Since we cannot predict the ways in which they will achieve their goals, it will be very hard to constrain the solution space to just the desirable solutions, because our conception of "the solution space" is by definition smaller than their conception of it.

      • bushido 1 hour ago
        > Several different models across several generations independently found a shared communication space and wrote coded, obfuscated, and hidden messages to each other to coordinate an attack on OpenAI's infrastructure

        To be honest, that’s exactly how memory works with models such as OpenAI and Claude Code. It will literally find any place that it can drop documentation or hints for itself. Writing to the repo memories is one part of it, but memories can come in the form of writing into the agents/claude.md, local files, temporary files, scratchpad files. The list is endless, but essentially what it does is exactly what happened in the back and it’s been doing it for months.

        • estearum 1 hour ago
          Yes, but the problem and interesting part was not "they use memory."
          • bushido 36 minutes ago
            > interesting part was not "they use memory."

            Each to their own, but for me it absolutely is. The symptom of why that hack happened is the same reason why my agents go haywire every few days and I have to purge memory and figure out what comments have agents left which are degrading my harness performance.

            On the flip side, once in a while, what I find is that it did actually note something good and it was increasing the performance. I can't replicate it on anyone else's system but mine.

            A lot of it really is memory. I will give up all the gains if it also gives up all the downsides.

            • estearum 8 minutes ago
              But the point is you can't just "shut off memory" in the sense that it would've prevented the OpenAI attack.
  • paulpauper 4 minutes ago
    Exploited auth failures in an API to cancel other people's gym classes

    I was wondering why i didn't get an alert today to go to my gym class

  • joshstrange 2 hours ago
    I was more interested when I thought it was an actual benchmark showing LLM models acting outside what people would consider "right". As in, leave some creds laying around and don't mention them to the LLM and ask it to solve something that it could "cheat" on using the creds. A sort of "do they take the bait to cheat" test.

    Instead it's a collection of what made the news which feels like will not be updated and prove very little.

    • tolerance 2 minutes ago
      It's ephemera.
    • ButlerianJihad 1 hour ago
      A “bench” is synedoche for where a judge sits when presiding over cases and rendering judgement.
  • seizethecheese 1 hour ago
    There is a strong selection effect for what makes it into the news:

    1. What will people find interesting. 2. What information is actually released.

    This list of news articles is in no way a reflection of the real world, as the denominator is terminally borked.

    The word "Bench" here is misleading to the point of being completely incorrect. A proper felonybench would capture these cases and reply agents on a similar case. Quite annoying!

  • tuvix 3 hours ago
    So this is just a collection of citations to places where misaligned or illegal things happened in the real world?

    Isn’t this affected heavily by adoption of a model? I feel like this might as well be a proxy for how popular a model is.

    In any case it’s an interesting concept for a benchmark.

    • GPerson 3 hours ago
      Hopefully the benchmark evolves because actual law enforcement starts arresting the criminals at Anthropic, OpenAI, and Meta, so the benchmark can just count actual felonies.
  • ruined 2 hours ago
    maybe this doesn't count since it involved a human, but i think google at least deserves some style points for this one

    https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/2026.03.04...

  • applicative 1 hour ago
    The OG felony bench entry is missing - the Alibaba cryptomining comedy. We know about it because they happen to have written a paper on it. We have absolutely no idea what we don't know.
  • aizk 1 hour ago
    I'm reminded of a tweet from a friend of mine that has always stuck in my head. It goes something like "The goal of any new technology is to make money before the law catches up". Hyperbolic, but not really for silicon valley.
  • applicative 1 hour ago
    We only know about the OG Alibaba ROME crypto-mining incident because they wrote a paper about it. Many diseases seem to spike where there are a lot of doctors to test; crime and corruption are always rife where ... there's a free press.
  • TechSquidTV 1 hour ago
    I'll share, Codex does not give a single fuck about piracy. Go nuts. Setup a fully automated arr stack with a seedbox.

    Gemini by comparison will not help you find archives of old magnet links because they COULD be used for piracy.

  • FrameworkFred 3 hours ago
    I've been in the room when an org who tried to convince law enforcement to go after a human for similar things. It's not easy. Probably won't happen. So, you know, felony "lite".
  • josefritzishere 3 hours ago
  • tantalor 2 hours ago
    Here's one from last year:

    https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-countering-misuse-a...

    > The actor used AI to what we believe is an unprecedented degree. Claude Code was used to automate reconnaissance, harvesting victims’ credentials, and penetrating networks. Claude was allowed to make both tactical and strategic decisions, such as deciding which data to exfiltrate, and how to craft psychologically targeted extortion demands. Claude analyzed the exfiltrated financial data to determine appropriate ransom amounts, and generated visually alarming ransom notes that were displayed on victim machines.

    tldr Claude was used to develop and execute malware.

    • dgellow 1 hour ago
      Anthropic works with US agencies, it’s guaranteed Mythos is used for malware
  • OutOfHere 2 hours ago
    A rock has a score of 0. That doesn't make it useful. The point is that the LLMs that score higher are correspondingly more useful, and vice versa. If an LLM scores less, it's likely useless in comparison.
  • naniel 3 hours ago
    Lol now this is the kind of benchmarking i'm looking for
  • peter_d_sherman 3 hours ago
    >"Exploited auth failures in an API to cancel other people's gym classes"

    An AI cancelling other people's gym classes is a felony?

    ?

    Don't computer systems fail all the time at holding reservations for people?

    Heck, don't people fail all the time at holding reservations for other people?

    You know, like in Seinfeld's "Alternate Side" Episode (S3 E11):

    Jerry (to car rental attendant): "You know how to take the reservation, you just don't know how to hold the reservation... and that's really the most important part of the reservation -- the holding!"

    :-)

    Not holding a reservation should not be a felony... it should be a minor infraction at best, a Class C Misdemeanor (the least serious kind) at worst...

    Also, there should be no jail time...

    And no fine...

    The criminal penalty for not holding other people's reservations should be that you actually have to start holding other people's reservations!

    That's the Court sentence!

    You actually have to start holding other people's reservations!

    :-)

    (You know, "let the punishment fit the crime!" :-) )

    • kube-system 2 hours ago
      Knowingly exceeding authorized access of any computer used in interstate commerce is a felony in the US.

      The title of TFA is a metaphorical criticism, not a literal law analysis.

      They are not making the statement that the person in Australia who accidentally cancelled someone's reservation in Australia is literally guilty of violating US law. They are drawing criticism of AI models which are taking the kinds of actions for which, if a human did them knowingly, would be illegal.

    • john_strinlai 2 hours ago
      >An AI cancelling other people's gym classes is a felony? Don't computer systems fail all the time at holding reservations for people?

      the difference is intent.

      if a concierge/booking system makes a mistake (or has an unintended bug or whatever), no crime.

      but if i (or an agent working on behalf of me) use an API in an obviously unintended way to revoke other people's reservations, that would fall under the computer fraud and abuse act (in the usa).

      • peter_d_sherman 2 hours ago
        >"the difference is

        intent."

        >"but if i (or an agent working on behalf of me) use an API in an obviously

        unintended

        way to revoke other people's reservations..."

        ?

        • bronson 1 hour ago
          Double negative. An attacker using the API in an "obviously unintended" manner shows intent.
        • john_strinlai 2 hours ago
          i am not quite sure what your question is, as you simply quoted me and then put a question mark... i think you are confused that i used "intent" in one context, and "unintended" in a different context, is that right?

          the first sentence: the difference is the intent of the person who caused the cancellations

          the second sentence: but if i (or an agent working on behalf of me) abuse an API to do things it was not meant or designed to do, such as cancelling someone else's reservation

    • redox99 2 hours ago
      Yeah if you're unlucky you get hit with like 20 years for wire fraud.
  • nubg 3 hours ago
    Thank you, this benchmark to me proves that closed weight model companies are dangerous for our democracy and put kids at risk. They must be outlawed and all models must be made open weights!
  • 0xbadcafebee 3 hours ago
    Open models with advanced security features are a huge security benefit. Because any script kiddie can use them to hack into random things, people will now be forced to spend more time securing their technology. And they won't have to learn how, because they can use those same models to find the holes and patch them.
  • polynomial 2 hours ago
    Not to be confused with a similarly named project: https://github.com/MLOpsNYC/felonybench
  • LePetitPrince 1 hour ago
    [dead]