January 29, 2026
The bot ate my homework (again)
Why "The AI Hallucinated" is the perfect legal defense
Internet mocks “AI did it” excuse; lawyers say “show the receipts”
TLDR: The article argues companies need cryptographic proof tying humans to AI actions, or “the AI did it” becomes a slick defense. The comments clap back: responsibility stays with the human/company, and legal standards and terms-of-service make “blame the bot” a nonstarter—accountability is the headline here.
The article claims the hot new corporate alibi is “the AI hallucinated”—and that without a durable, signed trail tying a human to an AI’s actions, it’s surprisingly hard to disprove. Cue the comments section: the crowd isn’t buying it. Top replies hammer the simple rule: if you shipped it, you own it. JohnFen insists responsibility doesn’t vanish just because a bot pressed send, while RobotToaster waves the vicarious liability flag: if employees’ mess is on the company, why would robot helpers be different? Freejazz goes full courtroom: burden of proof is on the defendant—no one gets to shrug and say “not me, it was the robot.” Others add spice, with noitpmeder yelling that model providers’ terms already make this your problem, not theirs. Meanwhile, the article’s call for cryptographic “authorization receipts” (think bank-style signed approvals, not vague login sessions) splits the room. Security-minded readers nod at “logs aren’t proof” and the chaos of multi-hop agents, while skeptics say that’s nice—but it doesn’t change who’s liable today. The memes? Pure gold: “The bot ate my homework”, “My agent slid into the competitor’s DMs,” and “show us the receipts.” Engineers want better guardrails; lawyers just want you to stop blaming the bot.
Key Points
- •The article argues that “the AI hallucinated” is difficult to refute without durable proof linking human delegation to agent actions.
- •Logs (including OAuth logs) can be tamper-evident and show events occurred but often fail to prove who authorized specific action scopes and constraints.
- •Multi-agent architectures (orchestrators, sub-agents, plugins, external runtimes) complicate maintaining a verifiable delegation chain across identity and audit domains.
- •There is a liability gap between recording events and demonstrating an independently verifiable authorization chain for those events.
- •The article advocates treating authorization as a durable, first-class artifact—akin to financial systems and checks—with properties like designated negotiation and non-amplification.