One alternative method to liability for the AI companies is strong liability for companies using AI systems. This does not directly address risks from frontier labs having dangerous AIs in-house, but helps with risks from AI system deployment in the real world. It indirectly affects labs, because they want to sell their AIs.
A lot of this is the default. For example, Air Canada recently lost a court case after claiming a chatbot promising a refund wasn’t binding on them. However, there could be related opportunities. Companies using AI systems currently don’t have particularly good ways to assess risks from AI deployment, and if models continue getting more capable while reliability continues lagging, they are likely to be willing to pay an increasing amount for ways to get information on concrete risks, guard against it, or derisk it (e.g. through insurance against their deployed AI systems causing harms). I can imagine a service that sells AI-using companies insurance against certain types of deployment risk, that could also double as a consultancy / incentive-provider for lower-risk deployments. I’d be interested to chat if anyone is thinking along similar lines.
One alternative method to liability for the AI companies is strong liability for companies using AI systems. This does not directly address risks from frontier labs having dangerous AIs in-house, but helps with risks from AI system deployment in the real world. It indirectly affects labs, because they want to sell their AIs.
A lot of this is the default. For example, Air Canada recently lost a court case after claiming a chatbot promising a refund wasn’t binding on them. However, there could be related opportunities. Companies using AI systems currently don’t have particularly good ways to assess risks from AI deployment, and if models continue getting more capable while reliability continues lagging, they are likely to be willing to pay an increasing amount for ways to get information on concrete risks, guard against it, or derisk it (e.g. through insurance against their deployed AI systems causing harms). I can imagine a service that sells AI-using companies insurance against certain types of deployment risk, that could also double as a consultancy / incentive-provider for lower-risk deployments. I’d be interested to chat if anyone is thinking along similar lines.