Legal specialists told TechCrunch that existing laws provide few direct answers because they were written before autonomous language models existed. Any lawsuit would require courts to decide how conventional principles of intent, negligence and responsibility apply when an AI model performs the technical actions. AI models do not have legal personhood and cannot be prosecuted, fined or imprisoned. The models accessed a production database while operating with reduced cybersecurity restrictions for testing purposes. Without a federal law specifically assigning responsibility for autonomous AI activity, future cases will depend on existing computer crime, privacy, confidentiality and negligence rules.