AI companies should be liable for harms caused by their deployed models

Forcing companies to pay up when powerful AI systems cause harm may be one of the strongest incentives for preventing that harm in the first place.

You want to make them bear that risk. If they do, they’ll have all the incentives they need to reduce risk.

Legislate a Digital Duty of Care that puts the onus on AI companies to build in safety by design and proactively address potential harm.

The central principle of health and safety law is that those who create risks are best placed to manage and control that risk in a sensible, proportionate, and pragmatic way.

My view: AI companies should be liable for harms their products cause. Liability gives them an incentive to invest in prevention upfront.

Chatbots are products, not people. They’re created and released by companies that must be held accountable when their products harm people, just like a charger that starts a fire or faulty airbags that fail to deploy in a car crash.

AI agents are agents of the person or organization that deploys them—and should be treated by the law as such. If a company hired human writers to write its summaries, that company would be liable for inaccuracies in those summaries. If a company’s human agent signed contracts in…

Under the existing laws on both sides of the Atlantic, if an AI agent or any AI-powered app escapes its sandbox and causes damage to a third party, the operator of the AI model will likely be liable for all the damage caused. Excuses like “AI did it” do not currently exist in the…

Like any other product, safety should come first for chatbots. And just like any other product, AI developers should be held liable when they harm the public.

It is highly likely that a developer and/or deployer of an AI system would be liable for harms caused by the AI acting autonomously, unless acts of the kind in question were unforeseeable.

Responsibility must remain clearly assigned across developers, deployers, and operators. Traceability and meaningful human oversight must ensure that autonomy never becomes an accountability gap.

At the same time, technology companies and platforms cannot hide behind the complexity of their systems. So responsibility must extend across the entire AI lifecycle, from those who design foundation models to those who deploy them to those who integrate AI into products and serv…

We need public accountability frameworks and corporate liability that follow the multi-actor chains through which AI is built and deployed, with accessible remedy for affected people wherever they live.

Justice systems will have to bridge accountability gaps of who is truly liable. They will have to grapple with the transparency questions. How does the person who's affected prove harm and gather evidence without access to models and information around how they are being impacted…

Liability, oversight and incident-reporting frameworks need to account for attribution and operational control, to ensure that we, as a society, do not build and deploy systems with a potential for catastrophic harm.

Rep. Foushee's People-First Chatbot Act meets this crisis head on. It requires safety by design, shuts off features that put minors at risk of suicide, and gives injured users and their families the right to hold chatbot providers accountable in court.

Companies must be legally accountable when they knowingly design harmful AI technologies that kill kids.

If harm arises from a defective AI system, legal responsibility should be distributed fairly. Clear, shared liability would not only better protect clinicians, but it would also build trust, encourage uptake of AI, and incentivise developers to prioritise safety from the outset. …

Physicians should not bear sole liability for harms arising from such model-level risks. AI developers should also be held liable for harms from AI due to their knowledge about the design of those AI tools.

Developers of autonomous AI systems with clinical applications (screening, diagnosis, treatment) are in the best position to manage issues of liability arising directly from system failure or misdiagnosis and must accept this liability with measures such as maintaining appropriat…

I just don’t think the developer is in a position to know exactly how their product is being used.

I just don’t think the developer is in a position to know exactly how their product is being used. Just as Microsoft isn’t held liable when a money launderer uses an Excel spreadsheet, AI companies shouldn’t be blamed when a criminal uses their technology.

AI should be understood as an instrument whose outputs remain the responsibility of human operators rather than developers.

Putting liability on users feels most incentive-compatible. While the link between how a model is developed and how it ends up being used is often unclear, the user decides exactly how the AI is used. Liability on users creates a strong pressure to do AI in what I consider the ri…

In most situations in which a harm arises, the company bringing a product to users and customers will be the one responsible for that harm. Importantly, open source developers should not be held liable for downstream misuse.

States should not be permitted to penalize AI developers for a third party’s unlawful conduct involving their models.

Under this standard, a company updating safety features or fixing security vulnerabilities becomes fully liable for completely unforeseeable consequences of those updates.

By holding developers liable for every downstream misuse, it could strangle open-source development, whereas negligence caps liability at “reasonable” care.

Making AI providers liable for securities violations generally would produce inferior incentives. [...] Neither doctrine suggests universal AI provider liability for resulting harm is appropriate.

SB 1012 creates an untenable liability regime that will stifle AI innovation and harm consumers’ access to beneficial technology.

Open source is the heart of software innovation and this bill slows it down. [...] There should be zero liability at the model layer.

SB-1047 holds liable [...] the original developer of that model. It is impossible [...] to predict every possible use. SB-1047 will force developers to pull back [...].

In most situations in which a harm arises, the company bringing a product to users and customers will be the one responsible for that harm. Importantly, open source developers should not be held liable for downstream misuse.

Strengthen and clarify liability laws so that responsibility for actions taken by AI systems rests where it should, which is with users, for systems they meaningfully control, and jointly with developers and deployers, if control is inadequate or absent. It's never with AI system…

Primary responsibility should rest with the deployer — the human or organization that put the system to use — with developers bearing secondary obligations for design safety, disclosure, and ongoing support.

The most straightforward approach to ensuring that companies develop and use AI responsibly is to place clear obligations on them, based on their role in the AI value chain, and to hold them liable when they fail to comply. This approach creates clarity for businesses in understa…

The legislation would apply throughout the AI lifecycle, ensuring that parties developing, providing, using or operating AI systems adopt reasonable governance measures appropriate to the level of risk involved.

A core theme of the legal statement is the rejection of the idea that AI has created a legal vacuum and operates outside the existing law. English law has a well-established track record of developing mechanisms for addressing technological disruption and existing doctrines in co…

It is highly likely that a developer and/or deployer of an AI system would be liable for harms caused by the AI acting autonomously, unless acts of the kind in question were unforeseeable.

Existing legal principles, such as under tort and contract law, can be applied by our courts to assess and determine liability in appropriate cases. That being said, we share the concerns raised by the Member, and will continue to study this issue, including consulting with pract…

Accountability generally runs to the company and its people. Who is accountable for an AI agent’s actions or omissions is one of the key questions that courts and regulators will continue to grapple with. But principles of agency, tort, and contract law, a recently enacted Califo…