# Liability for AI Harms: How Ancient Law Can Govern Frontier Technology Risk, with Prof Gabriel Weil

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-cognitive-revolution/liability-for-ai-harms-how-ancient-law-can-govern-frontier-technology-risk-with-prof-gabriel-weil
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-cognitive-revolution/liability-for-ai-harms-how-ancient-law-can-govern-frontier-technology-risk-with-prof-gabriel-weil.md
Podcast: ["The Cognitive Revolution" | AI Builders, Researchers, and Live Player Analysis](https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-cognitive-revolution)
Published: 2025-07-26T08:40:00+00:00
Episode link: https://www.cognitiverevolution.ai
Audio file: https://pdst.fm/e/mgln.ai/e/1113/pscrb.fm/rss/p/traffic.megaphone.fm/RINTP5186726892.mp3?updated=1753914793
Processing state: processed
JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-cognitive-revolution/episodes/liability-for-ai-harms-how-ancient-law-can-govern-frontier-technology-risk-with-prof-gabriel-weil
Duration seconds: 7918

## Resource

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…

## Actions

- request_transcript: `POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-cognitive-revolution/episodes/liability-for-ai-harms-how-ancient-law-can-govern-frontier-technology-risk-with-prof-gabriel-weil/transcription-requests` — Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.
- read_markdown: `GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-cognitive-revolution/liability-for-ai-harms-how-ancient-law-can-govern-frontier-technology-risk-with-prof-gabriel-weil.md` — Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.

A page view does not enqueue transcription. Agents should invoke `request_transcript` explicitly when they need this episode processed.

## Transcript

Full transcripts are not published on public pages unless there is a clear rights basis.