AI Frontiers

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In a recent interview, Demis Hassabis — co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, a leading AI lab — was asked if he worried about ending up like Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist who unleashed the atomic bomb and was later haunted by his creation. While Hassabis didn’t explicitly endorse the comparison, he responded by advocating for an international institution to govern AI, holding up the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as a guiding example.

Hassabis isn’t alone in comparing AI and nuclear technology. Sam Altman and others at OpenAI have also argued that artificial intelligence is so impactful globally that it requires an international regulatory agency on the scale of the IAEA. Back in 2019, Bill Gates, for example [...]

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Outline:

(01:57) How AI Differs from Nuclear Technology

(02:31) AI is much more widely applicable than nuclear technology

(04:18) AI is less excludable than nuclear technology

(07:37) AI's strategic value is continuous, not binary

(09:22) Nuclear Non-Proliferation is the Wrong Framework for AI Governance

(11:44) Approaches to AI Governance that Are More Likely to Succeed

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Since May, Congress has been debating an unprecedented proposal: a 10-year moratorium that would eliminate virtually all state and local AI policies across the nation. This provision, tucked into the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” would prohibit states from enacting or enforcing “any law or regulation regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems” for the next decade.

It's not clear what version of the moratorium, if any, will become law. The House sent the One Big Beautiful Bill to the Senate's Commerce Committee, where the moratorium has been subject to an ongoing debate and numerous revisions. The latest public Senate text — which could be voted on as early as Friday — ties the prohibition to the “Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment” (BEAD) program, threatening to withhold billions of dollars in federal funds to expand broadband from states that choose to regulate AI.

The provision's language [...]

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Outline:

(02:09) The Moratorium's Leverage -- and Its Limits

(03:27) The Patchwork Problem

(05:02) How the Moratorium Undermines Federalism and Good Governance

(07:18) Terminating Existing Laws

(10:00) Broad Opposition

(12:06) What Should Be Done Instead

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Since 2020, there have been nearly 40 copyright lawsuits filed against AI companies in the US. In this intensifying battle over AI-generated content, creators, AI companies, and policymakers are each pushing competing narratives. These arguments, however, tend to get so impassioned that they obscure three crucial questions that should be addressed separately — yet they rarely are.

First, how does existing copyright law apply to AI? Most existing statutes do not explicitly mention AI. Some legal experts, however, argue that courts can adapt traditional frameworks through judicial interpretation. Others contend that copyright's human-centered assumptions make such adaptation impossible.

Second, where current law proves inadequate, how should the original purpose of copyright law guide new solutions? Copyright was conceived by the Founders to “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts,” by providing creators with limited monopolies over their work. In the AI era, multiple stakeholders have legitimate claims: creators [...]

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Outline:

(01:40) How Does Existing Copyright Law Apply to AI?

(05:22) Should We Rethink Copyright in the Age of AI?

(07:41) How Should Broader Implications Influence the AI Copyright Debate?

(11:40) The Current State of AI Copyright Battles

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A global race to build powerful AI is not inevitable. Here’s how technical solutions can help foster cooperation.

As AI's transformative potential and national security significance grow, so has the incentive for countries to develop AI capabilities that outcompete their adversaries. Leaders in both the US and Chinese governments have indicated that they see their countries in an arms race to harness the economic and strategic advantages of powerful AI.

Yet as the benefits of AI come thick and fast, so might its risks. In a 2024 Science article, a broad coalition of experts from academia and industry raised the alarm about the serious threats that advanced AI may soon pose — such as AI misuse or loss of control events leading to large-scale cyber, nuclear, or biological calamities.

Because these risks wouldn’t be constrained by geography, it is in everyone's interests to mitigate them, hence calls by scientists from multiple countries for international efforts to regulate AI. However, an international AI development deal will only succeed [...]

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Outline:

(02:23) Assurance mechanisms for AI

(05:23) Hardware-enabled mechanisms

(08:12) Designing an Effective HEMs-Enabled Assurance Regime

(08:45) Pre-emptive

(09:46) Flexible

(10:31) Privacy-preserving

(11:44) Multilateral

(12:36) Unlocking New Policy Options

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This post originally appeared on RAND.

Edward Parker — June 13, 2025

This post originally appeared on RAND.

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When OpenAI released its newest AI models o3 and o4-mini in April, its president Greg Brockman made an intriguing claim: “These are the first models where top scientists tell us they produce legitimately good and useful novel ideas.”

If AI can indeed make scientific discoveries, that would not only have practical impacts for society but would also provide evidence that we've achieved true digital intelligence. But reaching expert consensus on what counts as a “scientific discovery by an AI” may prove more elusive than expected.

Ever since OpenAI released ChatGPT in 2022, a public debate has raged about whether the leading large language models (LLMs) are showing “sparks of artificial general intelligence” or are merely “stochastic parrots” or “autocomplete on steroids.” This debate has become repetitive, in part because neither side has offered a compelling definition [...]

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Abandoning liability mechanisms risks creating a dangerous regulatory vacuum.

The debate over AI governance has intensified following recent federal proposals for a ten-year moratorium on state AI regulations. This preemptive approach threatens to replace emerging accountability mechanisms with a regulatory vacuum.

In his recent AI Frontiers article, Kevin Frazier argues in favor of a federal moratorium, seeing it as necessary to prevent fragmented state-level liability rules that would stifle innovation and disadvantage smaller developers. Frazier (an AI Innovation and Law Fellow at the University of Texas, Austin, School of Law) also contends that, because the norms of AI are still nascent, it would be premature to rely on existing tort law for AI liability. Frazier cautions that judges and state governments lack the technical expertise and capacity to enforce liability consistently.

But while Frazier raises important concerns about allowing state laws to assign AI liability, he understates both the limits of federal regulation and the unique advantages of [...]

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Outline:

(02:08) Disagreement and Uncertainty

(04:49) Reasonable Care and Strict Liability

(06:56) Accounting for Third-Party Harms

(10:15) State-Level Liability

(13:44) AI Federalism

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One morning in the near future, on far-flung servers many miles from Wall Street, a new type of organization begins buying and selling stock. Its mission: maximize return on investment. It uses a network of AI agents integrated into global trading platforms to buy and sell stock in milliseconds — fast, adaptive, and unburdened by human fatigue.

This is much more sophisticated than today's algorithmic traders. These agents aren’t just executing trades based on preordained rules and thresholds. They’re operating autonomously: using analysis to identify new markets, acquiring controlling interests in companies, and making complex strategic decisions typically left to human traders. By noon, the AI organization owns significant stakes in a dozen firms. It begins using its insider knowledge to front-run trades — an illegal practice similar to insider trading. But there's another twist: thanks to distributed blockchain technology, this organization's human owners are completely anonymous. Authorities are [...]

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Outline:

(02:28) The Emergence of AI-Enabled Autonomous Organizations

(06:39) Why Current Regulatory Frameworks Are Unprepared

(08:45) Governing Autonomous Organizations

(11:20) Digital Golems

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