Gabriel Weil proposes developer liability for AI agent harms

Thank you, Speaker Menon and Chair De La Rosa.

I'm Gabriel Weil.

I'm a law professor at the University of Houston and a fellow at the Institute for Law and AI.

And I want to talk to you about what I see as the largest gap in the existing liability law

that is not addressed by your legislative package, which is that AI agents could engage in conduct that would be a tort or even a crime for a human.

and yet no one could be liable under current law.

And that is a consequence of two relevant features of our legal system.

One is that AI agents are not legal persons.

They do not have tort duties.

And that means not only that they can't be held liable, but that their principals cannot be held vicariously liable in the way that an employer is held liable for the torts of their employees within the scope of employment.

And second, the regimes that do apply to these harms, negligence and products liability, have important gaps.

They are inadequate to motivate some of the key precautionary measures that would prevent these kinds of incidents.

And so what I propose is a simple fix, a principle that whenever an AI agent engages in conduct that would be a tort or a crime for a human, someone's liable for that.

And so if neither the user nor any intermediary that fine-tuned or scaffolded the model

either intended or was negligent with respect to the conduct, so no downstream actor was at fault, then the buck should stop with the developer, and they should be liable regardless of the degree of care they exercised.

I have worked on legislation to this effect that's been introduced in New York State and in Rhode Island, and I'm talking to several congressional offices.

My written testimony, which will be submitted probably tomorrow, includes proposed legislative text for New York, and I'm happy to answer any questions about that or about any other liability issues, including the legislation that's in the package.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Noah?