From the even-a-stopped-clock-is-right-twice-a-day department:
FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson told Reuters that he thinks that companies should be liable for chatbot harms. At that time, Ferguson emphasized that he was tired of people anthropomorphizing AI tools. He insisted that, “if someone tells a tool to do something, and the tool does it, I don’t think we would say, ‘Oh, what do we do about the tool?’”
True, a narrow reading would be “if you tell the machine to do X and it does X, X should be attributed to you”.
A more broad reading (which I think is the right one, but I’m not holding my breath over since it’d tank the economy) is “if you build a machine that can conceivably do X, and then without anyone doing anything else, it does X, X should be attributed to you.” I agree that the quote from the FTC chair seems more like #1 than #2, but one would have to draw the line somewhere.