Artificial Intelligence

Colleen Chien, who co-directs the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology, said A.I. agents bent on a particular end could blackmail people or coerce them into acting destructively. But, she said, the digital presences need human help. “For a nuclear weapon or a virus to be released, there’s a person at many gates,” she said. “And that person is going to have to be manipulated into thinking that their best option is to move forward as told.”

“For firms that invest meaningfully, well-designed AI workflows can replace apprenticeship by chance with development by design,” Wayne Stacy, executive director of ​the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology and Caren Ulrich Stacy write.

Pamela Samuelson, a copyright lawyer who codirects the Berkeley Center For Law & Technology, tells WIRED that the government’s brief is a “significant development,” and one which is consistent with AI copyright rulings thus far.

Wayne Stacy, executive director of ​the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, said the measure is largely “duplicative” of existing ​ethics rules covering lawyers.

“No one’s talking really about speculation, although if you create the market, that will happen, right? You create the market, inevitably people will use it to bet on these prices,” said Professor Frank Partnoy.

“The 4Ds model needs a fifth ‘D’—it’s the key to keeping human judgment at the center of AI-powered legal practice,” writes Wayne Stacy, executive director, Berkeley Center for Law & Technology.

“The idea is to protect the formation of first-year law students by requiring them to do the reading, analysis and argumentation that is constitutive of legal work,” said Professor Chris Hoofnagle. “Once that happens, Berkeley offers many courses explicitly about A.I. lawyering.”

Last year, Attorney General Rob Bonta — as well as Kathy Jennings, the attorney general of Delaware — signed off on OpenAI’s corporate restructuring, albeit with a list of conditions. As a result, it’s dubious whether Musk has the legal right — known as “standing” — to bring a case, some legal experts said. If he ends up winning the lawsuit, the case will likely be appealed on that basis, said Vince Joralemon, a senior fellow at UC Berkeley’s Center for Law and Technology.

“The coming years will test which model of nonprofit control proves more sustainable in the AI economy: the socially oriented for-profit or the income-generating for-profit model,” write Professor Ofer Eldar and Mark Ørberg, assistant professor at Copenhagen Business School. That choice may shape how the next generation of AI companies balance safety, profit, and national power.

Vincent Joralemon, an AI law expert at UC Berkeley Law, said attorneys who fail to adopt such tools may eventually face scrutiny as well. “At some point, the general acceptance in the field will be that it is better to use these tools than not to use them,” Joralemon said.