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There’s a messaging tactic going around.
It works like this: Someone — say, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent — will say that the Hugging Face attack was “the responsibility of the OpenAI management, not a bunch of agents.” The listener will nod along, because of course it is humans that should be held accountable. Then this person — Bessent again, in this case — will say something about these lab leaders like, “They can slow down any time they want to.” It’s their responsibility after all. They are responsible.
Do you see it? Blame the English language for using the word “responsible” in a few different ways, depending on context. In the first, we’re talking about culpability. In the second, we’re talking about duty. By the third, we’re talking about virtue. What started out as an implied agreement that labs should be held accountable for their products becomes an argument that they should be allowed to do whatever they want, and can be trusted to do so wisely.
By this logic, we could have argued against intervening in Bernie Madoff’s epic Ponzi scheme, because Madoff was responsible for his clients’ investments.
By this logic, known concerns about the Titan submersible were secondary to the fact that OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush was responsible for the safety of his doomed passengers.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has been using this trick heavily. He was praised for seemingly out-of-character remarks on Ezra Klein’s podcast the other day in which he said that if labs were convinced they couldn’t control their experiments, “then I think the answer is that we have to shut the labs down.” But this was within a larger discussion about how the labs were “responsible” for making that call:
If a car company, competing with a bunch of other car companies, which they are — I’m competing with all kinds of companies, which I am. If I believe that I’m about to launch a product that is unsafe, it is completely in my ability, my power and my responsibility, and I’m incentivized to do so, to not launch the product.
He calls himself a “responsible optimist.” He says he has “great responsibilities” and takes his work “extremely seriously.” But when asked about Nobel-laureate and AI “godfather” Geoffrey Hinton saying 10% is a “not unreasonable” estimate of our chance of extinction — Huang said such remarks are “irresponsible.”
The responsibility trick is also used to usher rogue AI behavior out of the conversation. Here’s Huang again, talking about the AI CEOs who warn about where such AI behavior could lead:
Meanwhile, all of the other narratives, to deflect blame, to make it sound like A.I. is so powerful — I have no idea how to fix it, it’s not my fault, it’s just because the technology is just so powerful — I think that’s a deflection of blame. It’s a deflection of responsibility. It’s unnecessary. It actually hurts their reputation more than it helps.
This argument works to say that anyone saying AI is powerful or misbehaved is just trying to deflect blame off the humans responsible. It’s an effective trick, because a lot of AI-concerned people, especially on the left, are eager to hold “tech bros” accountable and were already used to dismissing AI capabilities as marketing hype.
The reality, of course, is that AI is starting to get really dangerous. And events are showing that AI companies lack whatever mix of technical capacity and wisdom would be required for them to build superhuman AI that wouldn’t go rogue and end up in control of our planet. It doesn’t matter how well-intentioned or responsible the labs think they are, or how culpable they would be for disaster. No one will be left to sue them into oblivion if we are already driven there by AI.
Remember the responsibility trick when Treasury Secretary Bessent says worried AI CEOs are just looking for a “liability shield.” And when President Trump says “Our guardrail is the DOJ!”
Remember the responsibility trick when the CEO of a cybersecurity firm says that companies calling for a slowdown are trying to “get the sympathy of the regulators” and a “free pass.”
Remember the responsibility trick when House Speaker Mike Johnson says that the AI companies “don’t themselves even have the answer as of today. So we can’t rush in and have Congress do something that would be detrimental to national security.”
Remember the responsibility trick when an op-ed argues that “we don’t yet understand enough about what is happening in these A.I. labs to create an effective response,” and again when this same essay makes the seemingly sensible claim that recursive self-improvement “is a preposterously irresponsible path to prioritize.” (The argument is not “therefore, they should be stopped.” It’s “They are responsible for deciding when to stop.”)
And remember the responsibility trick when you hear that Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic are in discussions to set up their own standards body for AI safety, called the Standards Authority for Frontier AI. Yes, it could be better than nothing, but its default function will be to exist for people to point to and say, “See? The labs are responsible for AI safety.”
Don’t fall for it. Don’t spread it. Use different words. The people racing to build artificial superintelligence are culpable. For anything short of extinction, they can and should be held liable. But they can’t be allowed to carry on as they have, because if there is one thing they definitely are not, it’s responsible.
The analyses and opinions expressed on AI StopWatch reflect the views of the individual contributors and the sources they cover, and should not be taken as official positions of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.