Episode
Liability for AI Harms: How Ancient Law Can Govern Frontier Technology Risk, with Prof Gabriel Weil
- Published
- Jul 26, 2025
- Duration seconds
- 7918
- Processing state
processed- Canonical source
- https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai
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Summary
Gabriel Weil from Touro University argues that liability law may be our best tool for governing AI development, offering a framework that can adapt to new technologies without requiring new legislation. The conversation explores how negligence, products liability, and "abnormally dangerous activities" doctrines could incentivize AI developers to properly account for risks to third parties, with liability naturally scaling based on the dangers companies create. They examine concrete scenarios including the Character AI case, voice cloning risks, and coding agents, discussing how responsibility should be shared between model creators, application developers, and end users. Weil's most provocative proposal involves using punitive damages to hold companies accountable not just for actual harms, but for the magnitude of risks they irresponsibly create, potentially making even small incidents existentially costly for major AI companies. Sponsors: Labelbox: Labelbox pairs automation, expert judgment, and reinforcement learning to deliver high-quality training data for cutting-edge AI. Put its data factory to work for you, visit https://labelbox.com Shopify: Shopify powers millions of businesses worldwide, handling 10% of U.S. e-commerce. With hundreds of templates, AI tools for product descriptions, and seamless marketing campaign creation, it's like having a design studio and marketing team in one. Start your $1/month trial today at https://shopify.com/cognitive Oracle Cloud Infrastructure: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is the next-generation cloud that delivers better performance, faster speeds, and significantly lower costs, including up to 50% less for compute, 70% for storage, and 80% for networking. Run any workload, from infrastructure to AI, in a high-availability…