“KGB agents are spying on me” is the same thing as “KGB is spying on me”, is it not?

An agent is an entity acting on someone’s behalf.

KGB's agents are human, OpenAI's agents are not. It's an important distinction because humans are responsible for their behaviour, while AI agents are not.

You cannot try an AI agent in a court of law, despite the anthropomorphising work the word "agent" is doing.

Exactly. It’s still just software, which someone programmed and deployed to do specifically dangerous/malicious things. I feel like we already have legislation and case law surrounding this.

Yes, those 2 are the same. But our KGB is saying “the microphone in your house is spying on you, it’s not us, the microphone broke containment”.

This distinction is silly.

We say "Google's web crawlers scape web pages." We don't insist you say "Google uses web crawlers to scrape web pages."

We describe software as having agency all the time. It's typical usage and it's efficient and it's well understood.

And we don't get angry when they're used interchangeably.

In this case, who holds the agency is exactly the point. Anthropic and OAI are claiming we need protection from AI itself, but the statement supported by putting agency in the right place is that we need protection from them.

I think those companies are referring to other companies - say Chinese AI companies - who we also need protection from.

"We" need protection from, or "OpenAI and Anthroptic's dreams of profits" need protection from?

I think that AI is dangerous and could be used as a weapon.

So yes, I would like to be protected from all parties. I don't think that's nuts.

IMO anyone sane wants some protection right now. The Q is whether we should seek protection through post-hoc accountability, or preemptive bans/certification on certain tech. Both methods will have a hard time stopping foreign actors, but preemptive bans have the added harm of locking in winners and paradoxically making us slower to develop more reliable and aligned systems. If regulation sets a standard for sufficient alignment, what further motivation is there to go beyond?

I would agree with you generally, but in this particular case, the distinction seems important because a significant percentage of the world population believes that agents can be self-aware, a-là Terminator etc.

Why can't agents be self aware?

Also, why is self awareness needed in a chain of agentic madness that escapes human control?

How would one define self-awareness?

Well - yes - there is no agreed upon definition. Which makes the issue even harder to clearly determine.

Please explain how it is "unclear" that agents "can be self-aware"? As Wikipedia would say, citation needed. Just because an agent can write convincing enough to convince you that it's "self-aware" doesn't mean it really is, in fact, self-aware.

Well - it's not hard to find. But ok:

Birch, The Edge of Sentience (2024), ch. 16 - "simply no way to assess sentience in an LLM"

Schwitzgebel, AI and Consciousness, (2025) — "we won't know before we've already manufactured thousands or millions of disputably conscious AI".

Butlin, Long et al., Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Science of Consciousness, (2023) — "no obvious technical barriers to building AI systems which satisfy these indicators".

Let me know if you need more.

I very much say "Google uses web crawlers to scrape web pages." and if something breaks, or some data is stolen, everyone else is going to be saying that Google has to take responsibility.

Those are two different issues. One is about typical speech patterns and one is about liability.

I agree with you on the liability issue, but I don't think there much question about this issue outside the anti-AI conspiracy campaigns.

And I disagree with your typical usage claim. I myself tend to use the phrase that has the fewest words in all cases. It's like the rule against using passive tense when writing.

oh we do! At least they google is quite good at adhering to robots.txt.

Google's web crawlers are automated and that's part of their business practice.

The attack here is neither of those things.

That distinction doesn't matter to my point.