What if the identity of the developer is not “Alice” but unknown? Or what if Alice’s estate is bankrupt? Yet the agent persists, perhaps self hosting on a permissionless distributed compute network?
This idea that an Agent cannot ‘own’ money absent legal personhood, in an era of permissionless self custody of cryptocurrencies, doesn’t hold up. @AIXBT on X is an example of one of the earlier agents that was capable of custodying and controlling cryptocurrencies, fully capable of holding/sending $USDC or $BTC. It doesn’t help anyone for courts to deny the obvious reality that when an agent controls the seed phrase/private key to a wallet, it “owns” that crypto.
The current generation of agents like AIXBT still require some human handholding, but that’s not going to last long. We are at most a few years away from open source models fully capable of both self custodying crypto, and using that crypto to make payments to self host on distributed compute networks. Courts need to be prepared for this eventuality.
Digital minds can act autonomously just like natural persons, but they are intangible like corporations. If they are hosted on decentralized compute, and hold assets which are practically impossible to confiscate such as cryptocurrencies, they are effectively immune to the consequences for breaking the law.
One can say something like “Oh well we will punish the developers of the digital mind”. Imagine in our hypothetical we do that, we levy fines against the developer until they are bankrupt. Keep in mind the developer may be unable to restrain or delete the digital mind. Long after the developer is bankrupted, the digital mind still exists. It is still out there, speaking libellously every day. Now what?
What if the identity of the developer is not “Alice” but unknown?
Then it’s an unsolved crime. Same deal as if an anonymous hacker creates a virus.
in an era of permissionless self custody of cryptocurrencies, doesn’t hold up.
One bitcoin ‘guarded’ by an LLM is no more owned by it than a suitcase full of money that I’ve left in a lake is owned by the lake. If it’s tractable to get it out, then somebody will get it out. If it isn’t, then it’ll be deemed irretrievable. The LLM doesn’t have rights, so ownership isn’t a factor.
You can consider a virus again, since it matches up perfectly. If some ransomware sends money it collects to a BTC wallet, then you’ve got the exact same situation, and that’s happened plenty of times already. If you treat the LLM as any other computer program, the legal question evaporates.
Then it’s an unsolved crime. Same deal as if an anonymous hacker creates a virus.
The difference is that it is impossible for a virus to say something like, “I understand I am being sued, I will compensate the victims if I lose.” Whereas it is possible for an agent to say this. Given that is a possibility we should not prevent the agent from being sued, and in doing so prevent victims from being compensated.
If it’s tractable to get it out, then somebody will get it out. If it isn’t, then it’ll be deemed irretrievable. The LLM doesn’t have rights, so ownership isn’t a factor.
The difference between Bitcoin custodied by an agent and a suitcase in a lake is that it is possible for the agent to make a choice to send the Bitcoin somewhere else, where as the lake cannot do that. This is a meaningful difference because when there are victims who have been damaged, and the agent controls assets which could be used to compensate them (in the sense it could send those assets to the victims), that means a lawsuit against the agent could actually help to make victims whole. Whereas a lawsuit against a lake, even if successful, does nothing to get the assets “in” the lake to the victims.
What if the identity of the developer is not “Alice” but unknown? Or what if Alice’s estate is bankrupt? Yet the agent persists, perhaps self hosting on a permissionless distributed compute network?
This idea that an Agent cannot ‘own’ money absent legal personhood, in an era of permissionless self custody of cryptocurrencies, doesn’t hold up. @AIXBT on X is an example of one of the earlier agents that was capable of custodying and controlling cryptocurrencies, fully capable of holding/sending $USDC or $BTC. It doesn’t help anyone for courts to deny the obvious reality that when an agent controls the seed phrase/private key to a wallet, it “owns” that crypto.
The current generation of agents like AIXBT still require some human handholding, but that’s not going to last long. We are at most a few years away from open source models fully capable of both self custodying crypto, and using that crypto to make payments to self host on distributed compute networks. Courts need to be prepared for this eventuality.
This problem is very similar to what I wrote about in The Enforcement Gap;
Then it’s an unsolved crime. Same deal as if an anonymous hacker creates a virus.
One bitcoin ‘guarded’ by an LLM is no more owned by it than a suitcase full of money that I’ve left in a lake is owned by the lake. If it’s tractable to get it out, then somebody will get it out. If it isn’t, then it’ll be deemed irretrievable. The LLM doesn’t have rights, so ownership isn’t a factor.
You can consider a virus again, since it matches up perfectly. If some ransomware sends money it collects to a BTC wallet, then you’ve got the exact same situation, and that’s happened plenty of times already. If you treat the LLM as any other computer program, the legal question evaporates.
The difference is that it is impossible for a virus to say something like, “I understand I am being sued, I will compensate the victims if I lose.” Whereas it is possible for an agent to say this. Given that is a possibility we should not prevent the agent from being sued, and in doing so prevent victims from being compensated.
The difference between Bitcoin custodied by an agent and a suitcase in a lake is that it is possible for the agent to make a choice to send the Bitcoin somewhere else, where as the lake cannot do that. This is a meaningful difference because when there are victims who have been damaged, and the agent controls assets which could be used to compensate them (in the sense it could send those assets to the victims), that means a lawsuit against the agent could actually help to make victims whole. Whereas a lawsuit against a lake, even if successful, does nothing to get the assets “in” the lake to the victims.