CFAA Ambiguity Puts AI Researchers at Risk

The Legal Dilemma of AI Research and CFAA

In the rapidly evolving field of artificial intelligence (AI), legal frameworks like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) are struggling to keep up. This has left AI researchers in a precarious situation where they might inadvertently violate the law during security testing. A group of scholars from Harvard, including Ram Shankar Siva Kumar, Kendra Albert, and Jonathon Penney, have been exploring this issue, arguing that the CFAA does not clearly apply to prompt injection attacks on large language models (LLMs).