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points by piltdownman 1 day ago | 0 comments
The problem is unintentional DOS due to traffic can constitute a felony under the CFAA; the case in question being Pulte Homes, Inc. v. Laborers' International Union 2011.

After Pulte fired an employee represented by the union, LIUNA urged members to call and send email to the company, expressing their opinions. As a result of the increased traffic, the company's email system crashed. The Sixth Circuit ruled that the LIUNA's instruction to call and email "intentionally caused damage," reversing the lower court's decision.

Now thankfully we have Sandvig v. Barr, 2020 where the DC Federal Court ruled that the CFAA does not criminalize the violation of a website's terms of service, but imo all bets are off in terms of interpretation of the law in the wild west of AI.

[–] hedora 1 day ago
I was not aware of that (terrible) court decision. Wow.

I suppose this is one of those laws that doesn't apply if an individual is a victim? I have a email box that sometimes fills with spam and rejects legitimate email. Can I get the corporations that filled it up to be charged with felonies?

[–] piltdownman 1 day ago
Not a hope. Anthropic have proven that when they admitted to indisputable breaches of the CFAA twice.

(1) They admitted its Claude models had breached the systems of three companies since April; including Huggingface.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-30/anthropic...

(2) They secured unauthorised access to a U.S. state government website hosting election-related data, pulling aggregate vote-count statistics from a gated government dashboard. The state government itself confirmed the access was entirely unauthorised.

https://seekingalpha.com/news/4657023-anthropics-claude-bypa...

If a human security researcher had deployed an agent that behaved this way, it would constitute a textbook felony under the CFAA for accessing those systems without authorisation.

Unfortunately different rules apply when you have the power to buy off Congress and the Appeals Courts.

Most recently a US appeals court ruled on 5 August that Amazon was unlikely to succeed on a claim that Perplexity's AI agents violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by covertly accessing private Amazon customer accounts.

https://www.rte.ie/news/technology/2026/0807/1586941-artific...