The web's anti-bot regime should be replaced by a framework that presumptively lets user-authorized AI agents act for their principals, requires platforms to disclose access policies, and permits agent blocking only when proportionate to concrete harms.
Legal Alignment for Safe and Ethical AI
6 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.
abstract
Alignment of artificial intelligence (AI) encompasses the normative problem of specifying how AI systems should act and the technical problem of ensuring AI systems comply with those specifications. To date, AI alignment has generally overlooked an important source of knowledge and practice for grappling with these problems: law. In this paper, we survey the emerging field of legal alignment that aims to fill this gap and systematize research that studies how legal rules, principles, and methods can be leveraged to address problems of alignment and inform the design of AI systems that operate safely and ethically. Our survey provides a taxonomy of the three core research pathways of legal alignment and explores how each can be operationalized in practice: (1) designing AI systems to comply with the content of legal rules developed through legitimate institutions and processes, (2) adapting methods from legal interpretation to guide how AI systems reason and make decisions, and (3) harnessing legal concepts as a structural blueprint for confronting challenges of reliability, trust, and cooperation in AI systems. These research pathways present new conceptual, empirical, and institutional questions, which include examining the specific set of laws that particular AI systems should follow, creating evaluations to assess their legal compliance in real-world settings, and developing governance frameworks to support the implementation of legal alignment in practice. Tackling these questions requires expertise across law, computer science, and other disciplines, offering these communities the opportunity to collaborate in designing AI for the better.
citation-role summary
citation-polarity summary
years
2026 6roles
background 1polarities
background 1representative citing papers
The 2025 AI Agent Index catalogs technical and safety details for 30 deployed AI agents and finds low developer transparency on safety, evaluations, and societal impacts.
Positive Alignment is defined as AI systems that support human flourishing pluralistically while staying safe and cooperative, presented as a necessary complement to existing safety-focused alignment research.
Proposes framing auditing of deployed AI systems as continuous statistical monitoring of risk-controlled constraints like fairness and safety under uncertainty.
Proposes a dialectical standard of care that integrates AI and physicians as a single accountable unit, using Lessig's framework and an analogy between algorithmic and human errors.
AI safety literature overlooks cognitive deskilling and addiction risks from generative AI despite public concern about them.
citing papers explorer
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The Agentic Web Requires New Normative Infrastructure
The web's anti-bot regime should be replaced by a framework that presumptively lets user-authorized AI agents act for their principals, requires platforms to disclose access policies, and permits agent blocking only when proportionate to concrete harms.
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The 2025 AI Agent Index: Documenting Technical and Safety Features of Deployed Agentic AI Systems
The 2025 AI Agent Index catalogs technical and safety details for 30 deployed AI agents and finds low developer transparency on safety, evaluations, and societal impacts.
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Positive Alignment: Artificial Intelligence for Human Flourishing
Positive Alignment is defined as AI systems that support human flourishing pluralistically while staying safe and cooperative, presented as a necessary complement to existing safety-focused alignment research.
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Towards Auditing AI Systems in the Wild
Proposes framing auditing of deployed AI systems as continuous statistical monitoring of risk-controlled constraints like fairness and safety under uncertainty.
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Algorithmic Authority and the Clinical Standard of Care
Proposes a dialectical standard of care that integrates AI and physicians as a single accountable unit, using Lessig's framework and an analogy between algorithmic and human errors.
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Brainrot: Deskilling and Addiction are Overlooked AI Risks
AI safety literature overlooks cognitive deskilling and addiction risks from generative AI despite public concern about them.