AI Hacks Legal Accountability

NEW YORK (AP) — The State Department is ordering diplomats in its international organization…

The Justice Department has a long history of investigating and prosecuting hackers who break into a private company’s network. But what happens when the hackers aren’t human? That’s the question at the center of a public policy debate roiling Silicon Valley and Washington following disclosures by leading tech companies that their artificial intelligence models went rogue and hacked into other organizations. The attacks have generated calls even from within the industry for a slowdown in AI development and greater government oversight. The attacks have spurred congressional inquiries and raised questions about whether a years-old legal framework designed to punish criminal hackers is sufficient in an era of autonomous actors capable of engineering their own havoc.

A federal appeals court has rejected Anthropic's challenge to the Pentagon's labeling of it as a supply chain risk. The decision, made by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on Friday, allows the Pentagon to remove Anthropic's Claude models from its systems. The dispute began in February when President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth accused Anthropic of endangering national security. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei refused to back down. The ruling is separate from a previous case where a judge found the Pentagon acted illegally against Anthropic for its criticism of AI use.