Ex ante versus ex post

it is largely the common law of torts - our society's most ancient and general legal mechanism for governing serious risks of physical injury - that will govern the frontier of AI development.

Major scholarly treatment of tort as the default frontier-AI governor: defends negligence doctrine's flexibility but shows liability can perversely deter developers from investigating and disclosing novel risks — concluding ex ante regulatory oversight is urgently needed.

many serious AI harms arise from residual, hard-to-eliminate risks rather than from readily provable negligence.

Weil's most developed statement since his canonical tort paper: severe third-party harms from misaligned agentic AI warrant strict liability, via abnormally-dangerous-activity doctrine or adapted vicarious liability.

Make no mistake. This is a de facto mandatory governmental licensing, preclearance and permitting requirement.

The sharpest analysis of the June executive order's 30-day 'voluntary' pre-release security review: the US has slid into ex ante approval for frontier models without legislation or the word 'licensing' — with the discretion and abuse risks that implies.

We want to be very clear: we do not support the liability safe harbor included in SB 3444.

Reports the Illinois fight over compliance-based liability safe harbors — the live legislative test of whether ex post liability gets traded away for ex ante compliance regimes.