Nicholas Caputo is a scholar focusing on how law can govern artificial intelligence and how AI can improve our legal and administrative institutions. His work begins from the problem of how to keep powerful, expert, and inscrutable decision-makers under legitimate democratic authority in their exercise of discretion. It is a problem that the law has long wrestled with and that frontier AI poses acutely.
He draws on jurisprudence, constitutional and administrative law, and advancing technical methods in AI alignment, evaluation, and control, using each of these fields as design materials for the others. His recent research focuses on legal alignment, the technological history of public and private law, and novel private governance instruments and institutions such as AI constitutions. Caputo is an Assitant Professor at Johns Hopkins University and the Law & AI Lead at the Oxford Martin AI Governance Initiative (AIGI). He has a J.D. from Harvard Law School and a B.A. from Carleton College.
