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Legal Alignment for Safe and Ethical AI

6 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.

6 Pith papers citing it
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

background 1

citation-polarity summary

fields

cs.CY 5 cs.AI 1

years

2026 6

roles

background 1

polarities

background 1

representative citing papers

The Agentic Web Requires New Normative Infrastructure

cs.CY · 2026-06-09 · conditional · novelty 6.0 · 2 refs

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.

Positive Alignment: Artificial Intelligence for Human Flourishing

cs.AI · 2026-05-11 · unverdicted · novelty 5.0

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.

Towards Auditing AI Systems in the Wild

cs.CY · 2026-06-15 · unverdicted · novelty 4.0

Proposes framing auditing of deployed AI systems as continuous statistical monitoring of risk-controlled constraints like fairness and safety under uncertainty.

Algorithmic Authority and the Clinical Standard of Care

cs.CY · 2026-04-29 · unverdicted · novelty 4.0

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.

citing papers explorer

Showing 6 of 6 citing papers.

  • The Agentic Web Requires New Normative Infrastructure cs.CY · 2026-06-09 · conditional · none · ref 85 · 2 links · internal anchor

    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.

  • The 2025 AI Agent Index: Documenting Technical and Safety Features of Deployed Agentic AI Systems cs.CY · 2026-02-19 · accept · none · ref 72 · internal anchor

    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: Artificial Intelligence for Human Flourishing cs.AI · 2026-05-11 · unverdicted · none · ref 105 · internal anchor

    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.

  • Towards Auditing AI Systems in the Wild cs.CY · 2026-06-15 · unverdicted · none · ref 32 · internal anchor

    Proposes framing auditing of deployed AI systems as continuous statistical monitoring of risk-controlled constraints like fairness and safety under uncertainty.

  • Algorithmic Authority and the Clinical Standard of Care cs.CY · 2026-04-29 · unverdicted · none · ref 10 · internal anchor

    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.

  • Brainrot: Deskilling and Addiction are Overlooked AI Risks cs.CY · 2026-05-05 · unverdicted · none · ref 52 · internal anchor

    AI safety literature overlooks cognitive deskilling and addiction risks from generative AI despite public concern about them.