The big labs are going to be on the hook for rogue behavior by Claude or Sol. Customers will be able to sue for damages and deflect regulators if their customer data is abused or their agents attack external services.
If you use a Chinese OSS model and it goes rogue? Yeah good luck with that, your shop is 100% on the hook.
They haven't so far.
I mean, hypothetically, yes, but class-action lawsuits get settled out-of-court, the lawyers get paid in Ferrari-multiples, the plaintiffs get paid in McDonalds coupons that expire in two weeks.
Slaps-on-the-wrist are written into the laws; a million-dollar fine is existential for a small company, and likely not even a line-item at Anthropic.
I'm sorry you are so jaded you can't recognize honesty when you see it, but that is what everyone deep in the AI space, including the non-executive researchers, are worried about.
Sorkin presented a theory that Nvidia bought HuggingFace to protect OpenAI from legal consequences. That a lawsuit determining accountability of actions by LLMs could threaten the AI financial network.
The largest of the finest print reminding you that it's 'sold as is' (or more encompassing variants that might continue '... with no warranty for fitness of purpose') means that liability remains in the lap of the purchaser / consumer / operator.
(This has been a source of immense frustration over my career - where such people have assured me that they have 'recourse' (it's always vaguely described) by spending money on proprietary products & services, rather than opting for functionally equivalent or superior free options.)
I think your third paragraph is implying a distinction (or conflating the difference?) between LLMaaS's and self-hosting publicly available models.
If it's just where it's hosted that provides the legal insulation then things like OpenRouter would give you that. (But again, I suggest that it would not.)
If a frontier lab is willing to draft an SLA that assumes liability, corporate will pay for it as long as the cost/benefit is in favor of it over insourcing.
Right?
Now, some tech web site might lead with "Agents at it again...", but the WSJ, et al usually won't.
So if you're running open models on AWS GPUs, you might as well run Claude (which AWS supports, and doesn't share any data with Anthropic).
Same with Azure/OpenAI.
I want to believe (pinky promises from terms of service don't count)
One engineer's salary to accelerate a team of twelve is so cheap you can't afford not to.
Open models on-prem is the future, not a single doubt in my mind.
The biggest problem we had with on-prem was maintenance as it took a lot of staff and time to ensure decent reliability.
Ah... oh.
Well, it's a nice thought.
I guess it depends if we believe that or not.
I see the flaw in your clever plan...
but didnt deploy an agent anywhere. instead we wrote all the code, system prompts, harness, etc locally and just shared those files with the customer.
all the customer had to do is deploy what we provided them on their locally hosted models, essentially just had to add inference. and boom, started working on their systems!
I spent the last 2 days building basic AI agents to automate some mundane supply chain workflows for a large company. Those seemingly boring workflows had bank statements, supplier IDs and other sensitive information.
For me it was all alarm bells, there is no way they can afford to give closed models access to this data. I was compelled to figure out an open model based solution for them, which made me realize that this is probably the only way for enterprises going forward.