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I'm surprised why some people are so interested in the idea of liability for extreme harms. I understand that from a legal/philosophical perspective, there are some nice arguments about how companies should have to internalize the externalities of their actions etc.
But in practice, I'd be fairly surprised if liability approaches were actually able to provide a meaningful incentive shift for frontier AI developers. My impression is that frontier AI developers already have fairly strong incentives to avoid catastrophes (e.g., it would be horrible for Microsoft if its AI model caused $1B in harms, it would be horrible for Meta and the entire OS movement if an OS model was able to cause $1B in damages.)
And my impression is that most forms of liability would not affect this cost-benefit tradeoff by very much. This is especially true if the liability is only implemented post-catastrophe. Extreme forms of liability could require insurance, but this essentially feels like a roundabout and less effective way of implementing some form of licensing (you have to convince us that risks are below an acceptable threshold to proceed.)
I think liability also has the "added" problem of being quite unpopular, especially among Republicans. It is easy to attack liability regulations as anti-innovation, argue that that it creates a moat (only big companies can afford to comply), and argue that it's just not how America ends up regulating things (we don't hold Adobe accountable for someone doing something bad with Photoshop.)
To be clear, I don't think "something is politically unpopular" should be a full-stop argument against advocating for it.
But I do think that "liability for AI companies" scores poorly both on "actual usefulness if implemented" and "political popularity/feasibility." I also think the "liability for AI companies" advocacy often ends up getting into abstract philosophy land (to what extent should companies internalize externalities) and ends up avoiding some of the "weirder" points (we expect AI has a considerable chance of posing extreme national security risks, which is why we need to treat AI differently than Photoshop.)
I would rather people just make the direct case that AI poses extreme risks & discuss the direct policy interventions that are warranted.
With this in mind, I'm not an expert in liability and admittedly haven't been following the discussion in great detail (partly because the little I have seen has not convinced me that this is an approach worth investing into). I'd be interested in hearing more from people who have thought about liability– particularly concrete stories for how liability would be expected to meaningfully shift incentives of labs. (See also here).
Stylistic note: I'd prefer replies along the lines of "here is the specific argument for why liability would significantly affect lab incentives and how it would work in concrete cases" rather than replies along the lines of "here is a thing you can read about the general legal/philosophical arguments about how liability is good."
I think liability-based interventions are substantially more popular with Republicans than other regulatory interventions - they're substantially more hands-off than, for instance, a regulatory agency. They also feature prominently in the Josh Hawley proposal. I've also been told by a republican staffer that liability approaches are relatively popular amongst Rs.
An important baseline point is that AI firms (if they're selling to consumers) are probably by default covered by product liability by default. If they're covered by product liability, ... (read more)