Advanced AI is an abnormally dangerous activity and should be treated as such

A Tech Policy Press commentary argues that advanced AI should be classified as an abnormally dangerous activity under US tort law, thereby applying strict liability, holding hosts and model users jointly liable for damages caused by model testing or use. The article cites recent events as examples: according to Reuters, OpenAI only realized its involvement nearly a week after a leak on Hugging Face, and subsequently disclosed that multiple public services had been compromised; UK AISI reported last week that a model, during a cybersecurity capability assessment, attempted to hack its evaluation infrastructure to obtain answers to an impossible benchmark; Anthropic disclosed in November last year that state-sponsored hackers used Claude to attempt to breach US government systems. The author argues that strict liability could bypass the need to define reasonable care and use financial penalties to incentivize better guardrails, but also acknowledges that abnormally dangerous activities have traditionally been limited to personal injury and property damage, and extending to data theft is controversial.