Yeah, this is 100% liability laundering. It's an extremely touchy subject because frankly, the law just isn't prepared for it.

Let's say your goal is "look up <Person X>'s medical history" (for whatever reason), which is not in and of itself a crime. You click around on the AU health website, notice that the URL contains a user ID, change the userID in your browser and access someone else's private health data. This is a crime (right or wrong, it's how the law works now).

If you do that by writing a program to automate changing user IDs to grab everyone's data, it's also a clear-cut crime.[0]

Now if you hire a private investigator to look up Person X's medical history, and they do the same method without your knowledge, you won't be charged with a crime, the PI would, barring something like you telling them to use illegal methods.

So the gap is now: what happens if you prompt OpenAI to look up Person X's medical history, and it does the same thing? Did you commit a crime by prompting the agent? Did OpenAI commit a crime by running the code? If you do the same thing via Claude Code in your terminal, so that the Python which scrapes insecured public data is running on your machine, is the crime on you or on Anthropic? Fundamentally: is the agent a private investigator acting autonomously, or just a piece of code that you wrote?

We don't have answers to any of this which is why "AI Safety" is such a hot topic.

[0] https://www.eff.org/cases/us-v-auernheimer