Category Archives: Products liability
Mindy Duffourc, ‘Risk Management Rising: Towards a Risk Management Defect Framework for Fair Governance of Black-Box AI Liability’
ABSTRACT EU law now recognizes artificial intelligence (AI) as a product that can be governed under product safety regulations and product liability rules. AI’s nature as an intangible, dynamic product that is capable of exhibiting varying levels of autonomy, opaqueness, and human-like reasoning make it difficult to assess its defectiveness under the new Product Liability […]
Yadav, Reason and Simpson, ‘Product Liability as a Model for UK AI Security’
ABSTRACT Negligence, as a legal framework, will struggle to meet two ‘core objectives’: prompting frontier AI developers to internalise and mitigate the risks posed by their systems, and offering a robust avenue of redress for those harmed by them. This paper argues that a ‘Frontier AI’ Bill in the UK should implement a liability regime […]
Trent Kannegieter, ‘Nondeterministic Torts: LLM Stochasticity and Tort Liability’
ABSTRACT Our laws were built for deterministic machines. With the same inputs, we expect a system to consistently produce the same outputs. But modern artificial intelligence (AI) systems, specifically large language models (LLMs) and other types of ‘generative AI’ (GenAI), challenge this assumption. These systems are stochastic, meaning that they produce varied outputs even when […]
‘Products Liability as the Pragmatic First Step to AI Regulation’
Catherine Sharkey, ‘A Products Liability Framework for AI’, 25 Columbia Science and Technology Law Review 240 (2024). With her recent article, ‘A Products Liability Framework for AI’, Professor Catherine Sharkey may have silenced at least some critics of artificial intelligence (AI) regulation. At the very least, the article stands as a sharp retort to anti-regulation […]
Karina Sanchez, ‘“Are Apps Products?”: Consumer Software and Products Liability’
ABSTRACT Products liability law is unclear on whether apps are products. Trial courts are faced with an increasing number of products liability cases brought against companies that create apps offering a blend of technology, content, and services. Without guiding authority, trial courts inconsistently conclude that apps are or are not products. Although many scholars have […]
Bryan Choi, ‘Tainted Source Code’
ABSTRACT Open-source software has long eluded tort liability. Fierce ideological commitments and sticky license terms support a long tradition of forbearance against penalizing harmful or negligent work in open-source communities. The free, noncommercial, distributed, and anonymous characteristics of open-source contributions present additional obstacles to legal enforcement. The exponential rise in software supply chain attacks has […]
Luke Meier, ‘Vicarious Product Liability’
ABSTRACT Discussions regarding the strict product liability cause of action have frequently-and unfortunately-conflated two separate questions: (1) Must a plaintiff show that somebody was at fault for her injury? (2) If so, must a plaintiff show that the defendant was at fault for her injury? When the strict product liability cause of action burst into […]
Ayelet Gordon-Tapiero, ‘A Liability Framework for AI Companions’
ABSTRACT Every day tens of millions of people engage in online conversations. These virtual interactions range from casual chats about daily life to deeply personal exchanges, where individuals share secrets, vulnerabilities, sexual fantasies, hopes and dreams. Through these conversations users receive emotional support and empathetic responses, get practical advice and productivity tips. Most importantly they […]
Chen and Hua, ‘Product Safety in the Age of AI: Autonomy, R&D, and AI Liability’
ABSTRACT We study optimal liability for AI-powered products with semi-autonomous capabilities (eg, self-driving vehicles). Like human users, AI can inadvertently cause product failures that harm third parties. Additionally, AI may introduce an extreme risk of large-scale social harm that renders full liability impractical. Raising AI liability for ordinary loss above the actual harm level can […]
Emad Atiq, ‘The Disaggregated Hand Formula’
ABSTRACT Commercial activities, like selling a car or serving hot coffee, can generate a risk of loss to which multiple individuals are exposed. Likewise, the burdens of avoiding such risks are rarely borne by a single person. When burdens and losses distribute across multiple stakeholders, when should negligence law tolerate or condemn the risky choice? […]