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Legal Alignment for Safe and Ethical AI

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

5 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.

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cs.CY 4 cs.AI 1

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2026 5

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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.

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.

The Agentic Web Requires New Normative Infrastructure

cs.CY · 2026-06-09 · unverdicted · novelty 3.0 · 2 refs

The agentic web requires new normative infrastructure of laws, norms, and practices to allow user-delegated AI agents to access online properties without being blocked as malicious bots.

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