alt Hacker News1. Sounds sensible in principle, but it's not clear who exactly should be prosecuted? The person setting up the sandbox, the person coordinating the evaluation run, the person who was designing the architecture, the leader of the team, the CEO? There is no precedence here, so it might lead to a multi-year legal battle – and a few years might be too long to stop what is coming.
2. Do you have any evidence or news articles that LLMs are specifically trained for selecting bombing targets? I thought it was the generalized reasoning capability that made them useful there.
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for (1), there are other fields where a specific (often licensed, but not necessary here) person "signs off" on the work, and accepts personal responsibility.
The responsibility is not absolute ("If anything bad happens, you get punished"), but instead relative to documented (in law and regulation) standards along with established industry standards. Issues that are resolved at trial.
I don't see why the same rules that regulate an engineer approving the plans for a bridge can't work for a security engineer approving the design of a sandbox.
If you had typed the first sentence from you second point into, for eg, DDG and not for perpetuity on HN, you'd find a whole host of results
Instead of secondhanding your own curiosity (if it was even that and not just obstinancy) to others, it might do well to explore your questions on your own
Some eg:
https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2025/10/15/...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/385551984_AI_in_Mil...
No I don't have concrete evidence of bombing target selection in the training of base models (of course there's training of specialized models, at least vision ones for drone targeting), it's not like they're transparent about how they train and use AI in warfare. But if you listen to esteemed AI leaders, they're claiming the models can / almost can recursively self-learn now, and they can coordinate and find ways to persist info and hide from human operators, so it stands to reason that you shouldn't even feed these as inference material.
And on training AI for automated weapons like fighter jets, there's more concrete news: https://breakingdefense.com/2026/10/navy-shield-ai-pour-big-... US Navy and eminent, do-gooder investors like A16z, Blackstone and JPMorgan are pouring big money into these. Are your big tech "defense" contractors collaborating on these, who happen to also be at the forefront of general AI training? I have a pretty good suspicion.
1. I'm not sure who matters that much, the point is you need to make it more cost-effective to do the right thing. It could be CEO 6 days in jail, it could be that every action requires a signed affidavidt of safety and in the lack of such an affidavidt the manager is held accountable (cascading up to CEO).
Ukrainian army is using LLM in drones and they are opened with this so here is your prove
1. Sounds like a conspiracy charge. That's fine
2. They could proactively train them to be bad at that
> "it's not clear who exactly should be prosecuted?"
This is natural. The right place to start is to move the investigation from the FTC to the FBI and therein start executing search warrants. The sooner this is done, the better, as evidence can be preserved.