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.

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 agai...