**Ninth Circuit: Your AI Agent Can't Violate Hacking Law. But You Might**

> The rise of AI is bringing a bunch of fascinating legal questions that are harder to answer than many expect. The latest one: who is liable if an agentic system running on its own hacks someone? That&\#039;s the question a bunch of people have been asking this past week in the wake of multiple stories… Sign In Register Preferences Techdirt TechDirt GreenHouse Free Speech Error 402 Ctrl-Alt-Speech Deals Jobs Support Techdirt Daily Deal: The Ultimate Python & Artificial Intelligence Bundle Ninth Circuit: Your AI Agent Can&\#8217;t Violate Hacking Law. But You Might. Ninth Circuit: Your AI Agent Can&\#8217;t Violate Hacking Law. But You Might. Legal Issues from the agentic-law dept Wed, Aug 5th 2026 11:23am - Mike Masnick The rise of AI is bringing a bunch of fascinating legal questions that are harder to answer than many expect. The latest one: who is liable if an agentic system running on its own hacks someone? That&\#8217;s the question a bunch of people have been asking this past week in the wake of multiple stories of agentic tools breaking out of their sandboxes during testing. But it&\#8217;s also a question that the Ninth Circuit brushed up against this week, in a ruling that says an agentic tool isn&\#8217;t the one doing the &\#8220;accessing&\#8221; under the federal hacking law. A person is. The challenging part is figuring out which person. There&\#8217;s obviously been plenty of talk over the past couple of weeks regarding agentic tools supposedly going &\#8220;rogue.&\#8221; There was, of course, the story of OpenAI&\#8217;s tools hacking Hugging Face , the AI repository (also covered on Ctrl-Alt-Speech ). And then soon after, Anthropic admitted that &\#8220;hey, our models kinda did something similar .&\#8221; And while these are generally referred to as the bots going rogue, the reality is not quite that. The bots are doing literally what they were asked to do: accomplish some goal by any means necessary. And in both stories, they found ways to accomplish their goals, often by hacking into other systems or doing things we would normally consider malicious. In the case of OpenAI and Hugging Face, it appears that the tool did what plenty of hackers try to do, just a whole hell of a lot faster . It found a zero-day vulnerability to break out of the sandbox OpenAI thought it had created. It then took a series of steps to enable it to hack into Hugging Face. In Anthropic&\#8217;s case (which only came to light after the OpenAI incident caused Anthropic to go back and look) the situation was a bit different. Some of the tests included prompts telling the agentic tools that they were in a sandboxed simulation. But because of a configuration error, they really weren&\#8217;t. And since the models had been told flat out in the prompt that everything around them was simulated, when they found a way out, they reasonably concluded that the way out was part of the simulation too. Either way, I&\#8217;ve seen some discussion online wondering why these two companies aren&\#8217;t being charged with violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (the CFAA). We&\#8217;ve written about the CFAA for years, mostly in how it&\#8217;s a badly worded law that has been abused in both civil and criminal cases to go after &\#8220;anything I don&\#8217;t like on a computer&\#8221; rather than its actual purpose of targeting genuine hacking. And CFAA lore goes back to 1988 and the infamous Morris Worm , in which Robert Morris accidentally created an internet virus that took down portions of the then still small internet. Morris was found guilty of violating the CFAA for doing so. Which has some people asking how are these other two stories any different. But t...

**来源信息**
- **来源**：Hacker News：AI 热帖
- **分类**：行业
- **发布时间**：2026-08-06 03:34（北京时间）
- **原文**：[打开原文](https://www.techdirt.com/2026/08/05/ninth-circuit-your-ai-agent-cant-violate-hacking-law-but-you-might)