Mackenzie Arnold urges broad liability scope and AG partnership
Mackenzie Arnold of the Institute for Law and AI emphasizes liability as an essential tool, noting the summer's autonomous cyber incidents went unnoticed. She urges the Council to broaden scope beyond chatbots to deployed internal systems and to partner with the AG and whistleblowers on enforcement.
Thank you.
Thank you, and a special thanks to Speaker Manon for putting this together and for all the council members here.
My name is Mackenzie Arnold.
I'm the Managing Director of the U.S.
Law and Policy Team at the Institute for Law and AI.
And as you might guess from the title, we do legal research and policy advising related to frontier AI questions, and especially the legal challenges posed by AI.
It might not surprise you, but three years ago, I testified in front of the U.S.
Senate on AI and liability.
And maybe it's worth going back to some of the recommendations I made there.
First, that agentic harms are coming.
That was clear three years ago.
It's clear now.
Unfortunately, we haven't risen to that challenge, but you're doing some of the work to get us there.
Second, and maybe just as importantly, I want to emphasize that liability is an essential tool, and the status quo simply is not enough.
And we don't need to think of some hypothetical future world to figure that out.
Liability exists right now, right?
Those incentives are here.
They were here this summer.
And what happened with the status quo?
We had a spate of cyber incidents, not by humans, but by autonomous AI systems.
Not only that, but they went unnoticed for extended periods of time by the people positioned to find them.
And even in the rare occasions when they did get indications, they often failed to communicate that information internally to the people who could.
That status quo simply can't hold.
So what can we do going forward?
I think you need to get the information right, the scope right, and enforcement right.
On the scope, I'd encourage you to think beyond just chatbots.
This is a question of agents.
Also think beyond systems that are not yet deployed.
These harms that occurred over the summer were not commercially available models.
They were systems that were inside of OpenAI, inside of Anthropic and Meta.
In terms of information, we need to make sure that companies are monitoring their systems, recording that information, and providing it to you in the form of incident reports.
And in order to make all of that work, you'll need to partner with the state attorney general and with whistleblowers to bring cases.
Like I said, liability won't be the only solution or the entire solution, but it's a great first step, and I appreciate all of your efforts.