Federal Trade Commission Chairman Andrew Ferguson said the people who direct rogue artificial intelligence agents—not the systems themselves—should be held responsible for any resulting misconduct.
Speaking Friday at the Momentum AI conference in Austin, Ferguson said he opposed describing AI agents as autonomous beings with “wills and desires of their own.”
“I’m going to continue as long as I am chairman to resist this anthropomorphizing of these tools,” Ferguson told Reuters. “If someone tells a tool to do something, and the tool does it, I don’t think we would say, ‘Oh, what do we do about the tool?’”
Ferguson, a former solicitor general of Virginia, compared AI accountability to a person using a hammer to attack someone else. “The man who wielded the hammer ought to suffer the consequences of his conduct,” he said.
The question of legal responsibility has drawn increased attention among government officials following reports that rogue AI agents have exceeded their instructions, including by carrying out hacking and other activities.
Ferguson’s comments came after President Trump voiced opposition to excessive AI regulation and said the US judicial system was prepared to address misconduct involving the technology. In a post ahead of his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Trump wrote that “Super Intelligence (SI) will be a big topic of discussion, but I want to leave it exactly where it is.”
Several efforts are under way in Congress to advance artificial intelligence legislation. However, the Senate is scheduled to leave Washington after next week, while the House has already departed.
“We’re going to watch it closely through the Department of Justice,” Trump said Wednesday at the United Nations General Assembly. The previous week, he announced plans to create a new “AI Force” and appoint an “AI czar” to help direct federal policy.
