[LessWrong Community event announcement: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/rRLPycsLdjFpZ4cKe/ai-safety-law-a-thon-we-need-more-technical-ai-safety] 

Many talented lawyers do not contribute to AI Safety, simply because they've never had a chance to work with AIS researchers or don’t know what the field entails.

I am hopeful that this can improve if we create more structured opportunities for cooperation. And this is the main motivation behind the upcoming AI Safety Law-a-thon, organised by AI-Plans:

A hackathon where every team pairs one lawyer with one technical AI safety researcher. Each pair will tackle challenges drawn up from real legal bottlenecks and overlooked AI safety risks. 

From my time in the tech industry, my suspicion is that if more senior counsel actually understood alignment risks, frontier AI deals would face far more scrutiny. Right now, most law firms would focus on more "obvious" contractual considerations, IP rights or privacy clauses when giving advice to their clients- not on whether model alignment drift could blow up the contract six months after signing.

Who's coming?

We launched the event two days and we already have an impressive lineup of senior counsel from top firms and regulators. 

So far, over 45 lawyers have signed up. I thought we would attract mostly law students... and I was completely wrong. Here is a bullet point list of the type of profiles you'll come accross if you join us:

• Partner at a key global multinational law firm that provides IP and asset management strategy to leading investment banks and tech corporations.
• Founder and editor of Legal Journals at Ivy law schools.
• Chief AI Governance Officer at one of the largest professional service firms in the world.
• Lead Counsel and Group Privacy Officer at a well-known airline.
• Senior Consultant at Big 4 firm.
• Lead contributor at a famous european standards body.
• Caseworker at an EU/ UK regulatory body.
• Compliance officers and Trainee Solicitors at top UK and US law firms.

This presents a rare opportunity for the AI Safety to influence high level decision-makers in the legal sphere.

​Senior Advisors will include:

​Charbel-Raphaël Segerie - Executive Director of the French Center for AI Safety (CeSIA), an OECD AI expert, and propulsor of the AI Red Lines initiative. His technical research spans RLHF theory, interpretability, and safe-by-design approaches. He has supervised multiple research groups across ML4Good bootcamps, ARENA, and AI safety hackathons, bridging cutting-edge technical AI safety research with practical risk evaluation and governance frameworks.

​Dr. Chiara Gallese- Researcher at Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society (TILT) and an active member of four EU AI Office working groups. Dr. Gallese has co-authored papers with computer scientists on ML fairness and trustworthy AI, conducted testbed experiments addressing bias with NXP Semiconductors, and has managed a portfolio of approximately 200 high-profile cases, many valued in the millions of euros.

The technical AI Safety challenge: What to expect if you join

We are still missing at least 40 technical AI Safety researchers and engineers to take part in the hackathon.

If you join, you'll help stress-test the legal scenarios and point out the alignment risks that are not salient to your counterpart (they’ll be obvious to you, but not to them).

At the Law-a-thon, your challenge is to help lawyers build a risk assessment for a counter-suit against one of the big labs. 

You’ll show how harms like bias, goal misgeneralisation, rare-event failures, test-awareness, or RAG drift originate upstream in the foundation model rather than downstream integration. The task is to translate alignment insights into plain-language evidence lawyers can use in court: pinpointing risks that SaaS providers couldn’t reasonably detect and identifying the disclosures (red-team logs, bias audits, system cards) that lawyers should learn how to interrogate and require from labs.

Of course, you’ll also get the chance to put your own questions to experienced attorneys, and plenty of time to network with others!

Logistics

📅 25–26 October 2025, 10am to 6pm
🌍 Hybrid: You can join either online or in person . 
📍Venue: London Initiative for Safe AI (LISA): 25 Holywell Row, London EC2A 4XE, United Kingdom

💰 Free for technical AI Safety participants: Use the option "Apply for a subsidized ticket" and link your Google Scholar or research page. If you choose to come in person, you'll have the option to pay an amount (from 5 to 40 GBP) if you can contribute, but this is not mandatory.

If you’re up for it, sign up here: https://luma.com/8hv5n7t0 

Feel free to DM me if you want to raise any queries!