Artificial intelligence is not simply a distinct technological phenomenon. It is a battleground of competing values, incentives, and worldviews. Questions as fundamental as “What is AI?” remain deeply contested, in part because vastly different foundational premises fracture thinking and scholarship around AI. Experts, regulators, and the public have unsettled moral commitments, political and professional priorities, risk tolerances, and divergent understandings of how AI is progressing and how far it can go.
Three core intellectual communities currently shape the public conversation around AI: Accelerationists who generally believe that artificial intelligence will dramatically improve the human experience; Safetyists who are concerned about its potential catastrophic or existential risks; and Skeptics who doubt claims of AI’s transformative impact and urge a focus on existing issues, including the replication of biases.
What can we learn from the tensions and interactions among these divergent worldviews? This course will explore some of the most fundamental debates in the legal and corporate governance of frontier AI models and systems. Through discussion with guests representing each view and analysis of relevant legal texts, students will be equipped with the intellectual tools to map, compare, and critique each perspective’s underlying assumptions and dependencies.
AI Governance Speaker Series
Legal Telescopes, New Ways of Seeing Law at Scale with Neel Guha
Tort Law as a Tool for Mitigating Catastrophic AI Risk with Gabriel Weil
Impact Litigation for Safe AI with Tyler Whitmer
Institutional Disruption and the Longer View with Dean Woodley Ball, Tim Hwang, and Ketan Ramakrishnan
AI Policy at the Frontier with Nathan Calvin and Fin Moorhouse