Gillian Hadfield

AI safety and governance

In addition to studying the foundations of the science of normativity, I also work on practical proposals for governing AI, especially to ensure AI is safe and beneficial for all. Whereas much of the work in this domain is focused on developing specific standards for AI behaviors (such as in the EU’s 2024 AI Act), my work focuses on building the legal and regulatory infrastructure that will enable us to develop and adapt necessary rules for AI in a dynamic and evidence-based way over time.

One line of this work responds to the critical challenge, which I explored in my 2017 book Rules for a Flat World: Why Humans Invented Law and How to Reinvent It for a Complex Global Economy, of developing appropriate law and regulation for a fast-moving, complex and global technology. Together with Jack Clark, I’ve developed a proposal for how we recruit private sector efforts and investment to the challenge of devising more effective and responsive methods for aligning AI systems with democratically-set goals and principles. This approach, which we call regulatory markets, envisions the development of a robust sector of licensed private regulatory companies (profit and non-profit) that achieve publicly-set regulatory targets through innovation of new regulatory methods.

In another line of work with Tino Cuellar and Tim O’Reilly I focus on the legal infrastructure needed to enable governments to implement a wide range of existing and evolving requirements for safe AI systems that integrate well into our complex economic and social systems. This infrastructure has evolved for human actors and corporations but is still missing for AI actors and entities. Key requirements include creating registration schemes for powerful systems (giving governments critically missing visibility into how this transformative technology is evolving and what is known inside private technology companies about its behavior) and identification/registration schemes for AI agents in order to ensure accountability under conventional rules governing the marketplace such as contract enforcement and responsibility for unsafe or unreasonable behavior.

I’m also working with colleagues through the International Dialogues on AI Safety to develop this legal and regulatory infrastructure at the global level.