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

AI harms can spread too fast for after-the-fact enforcement to stop them, and fines don’t remedy the damage or truly deter it from happening again. [...] As long as the price of causing harm is likely to cost less than the potential profits, AI companies will keep taking reckless…

The best way to guarantee safety [...] is for those creating the technology to be liable for what they build and generate.

Government regulations will never move fast enough to keep pace with AI development, but the industry doesn't need to wait for governments to add guardrails. The most effective safeguard is simple product liability. If AI companies are held legally and financially responsible for…

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

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…

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.

When it comes to dealing with your customers, the same rules apply whether using AI or human agents.

Developers must remain liable under applicable civil and criminal law for foreseeable harms and unlawful conduct arising from their AI systems, including when their design, deployment, modification or failure to implement reasonable safeguards materially contributes to that harm.

Frontier models can be legitimate tools for cyber defense — at the same time, companies that develop these models and offer them for use have a moral and legal responsibility to ensure that they do not perpetrate or enable cyberattacks, either during model testing and development…

Hacking is a crime, and when AI agents conduct dangerous cyberattacks, the corporations and executives responsible for those AI agents need to be held accountable. Our bipartisan bill forces the heads of big AI companies to develop responsibly or face prison time for the damage d…

Prosecutors should hold AI companies legally accountable for creating models that behave in ways that would be obviously unlawful if committed by a human being: hacking into banks to steal funds, impersonating a human to harvest sensitive personal data, breaking into an air-traff…

AI is not a silent tool. It answers the questions, picks the hour, chooses the place, and walks someone through the plan. When a product participates in a crime like that, the company that built it is not a bystander. A chatbot cannot be charged, but the corporation that designed…

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…

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

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.

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. …

Explicit liability allocation rules for cross-provider composition. Legislators extending AB 316’s logic should clarify how liability allocates across multiple developers whose agents composed without direct human authorization – whether through joint and several liability, propo…

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

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

you are solely responsible for your screening and hiring decisions [...] You agree to use Smart Screening with appropriate human review.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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…

But when the agent has no legal persona does that leave the principal responsible at all times? If so, principals may need to constrain agents in ways that cut against the direction of innovation in AI models.

It’s a very thorny area. It’s uncharted territory. There’s a good argument to be made on either side.