Nobody Knows if OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s AI Hacking Sprees Are Illegal | SpinGraph: Regulatory blame shift
SpinGraph analysis of Google News: OpenAI's Nobody Knows if OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s AI Hacking Sprees Are Illegal story: regulatory blame shift, The Shield, S…
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Nobody Knows if OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s AI Hacking Sprees Are Illegal - WIRED
CFAA, red-teaming, AI security, legal ambiguity, self-testing
OpenAI and Anthropic are conducting internal 'hacking' exercises to test AI model robustness. Legal experts disagree on whether such self-testing violates the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). No formal charges or enforcement actions have occurred, but ambiguity persists around authorization boundaries.
Emphasizes structural legal lag while minimizing scrutiny of corporate self-authorization practices; avoids asking whether internal consent suffices under CFAA precedent.
Responsible innovators operating in a gray zone created by obsolete law.
OpenAI and Anthropic’s AI security tests may be illegal due to unclear U.S. hacking laws.
Precedent cases where courts ruled internal penetration testing violated CFAA; Whether either company disclosed test scope or limitations to users or partners
The article combines expert attribution (lending authority) with strategic ambiguity ('nobody knows') and passive framing ('are illegal') to position corporate action as reactive rather than agentic. It makes the legal gray zone feel larger and more inevitable than the documented facts warrant—while offering no evidence that either company sought or received explicit legal clearance for specific test types, creating tension between claimed responsibility and unverified procedural rigor.
Nobody knows if OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s AI hacking sprees are illegal.
Extracted statistics from the source narrative
U.S. federal law criminalizing unauthorized computer access