Whatever may or may not be happening with law enforcement - no one is confused about the liability.

It's no different than when a company's machine cuts off a worker's finger. No one thinks "Gosh! The machine did it, not us."

If they're not being held legally liable, then I would not agree that "no one is confused about the liability". Sure, I agree with your analogy with a machine cutting off a finger, but you and I are just two people gabbing on HN. Nothing we say has any effect on OpenAI. And if law enforcement doesn't have an effect on them, then talk about "liability" is just empty words.

To touch base - I believe OpenAI has agreed to settle with them for $100M. Or a partnership worth $100M. Or something so that Hugging Face won't go after them.

Well... if that's true, and I don't know that it is, it's not because of the agents. It's because of the money. People with money get away with crimes all the time and it has nothing to do with agents.

If any of the orgs that were hacked decided to sue OpenAI they'd probably have a good chance of winning. It's just that none of them has.

The binding legal contractual consequence known coloquially as "additional investment".