Silicon Valley Law Group Blog
I am excited this year once again to chair the American Bar Association Artificial Intelligence and Robotics National Institute October 12-13 at Santa Clara Law School near San Jose, California. Silicon Valley Group is proud to be an Institute sponsor again.
The world is changing before our eyes as a shockwave of headlines around the world sets off alarms about the risk that superintelligence might extinguish humanity. And yes, the Institute will in fact have a panel talk about the risks of superintelligence. In mid-June, I started planning a panel about the present risks of rogue AI agents developed by businesses large and small causing damage in the short run and extrapolating those risks into the future to consider what harm superintelligence might cause in future decades, especially in light of the impending implementation of recursive self-improvement (powerful AI training other AI systems to become yet more powerful).
On September 8, however, an Anthropic researcher resigned his position and warned the world about the possibility of superintelligence destroying humanity. Suddenly, my dangerous AI topic was top of mind for U.S. presidents, AI leaders, industry executives, and the major mass media, and a wide swath of the population. Consequently, I am pivoting the panel a bit to meet the moment. We will cover the hack by a swarm of Hugging Face systems by rogue OpenAI agents. We still plan to discuss risks to the world of recursive self-improvement. And we will consider the long-run future of superintelligence in light of the apparent acceleration of the technology timeline. I will present some legal and policy options to address the grave risks of superintelligence. My hope is that plotting a careful course can allow humanity can receive the potentially miraculous benefits of powerful AI while avoiding harm and its most serious dangers.
In addition to my dangerous AI panel, we will have keynotes on:
• The impact of agentic AI on our clients
• A California Court of Appeals justice’s report on how the California court system is integrating AI into its operations
• Santa Clara Law School’s new AI concentration and the University’s new AI Center
• Anthropic’s Claude Mythos model and its impact on cybersecurity threats and defenses, along with a discussion of how enterprises and governments can defend against swarms of rogue AI agents seen in the OpenAI hack from a cybersecurity perspective
The Institute will also have panels on practical topics, as we do each year. Attendees can earn up to 10 continuing legal education credit hours (including ethics) in 12 other sessions.
Here are the other panels in this year’s Institute:
• Breaking Bad: Who’s Liable When AI Agents Do Bad Things?
• Keeping Up With AI: The Latest Regulation and Governance
• AI in the Courtroom and in Chambers
• Tools of the Trade: AI Automation of IP Applications and Enforcement
• Let’s Make a Deal: How AI and Robotics Are Changing M&A
• Music to My Ears? The Not-So-Silent Threat of AI (in entertainment and IP law)
• Senior In-House Counsel Take on Hot AI Topics
• Emotional Intelligence? Smart Ways to Address the Legal Challenges of Emotion AI
• Human in the Loop: An AI Crisis Tabletop
• A Tabletop Exercise on IP Risks of Agentic AI
• One Battle After Another: AI vs. Ethics (1 hour of ethics credit)
• Is the Future Rosy for Robots? Legal Challenges for Mass-Market Household Humanoid Robots and Other Physical AI.
Please join us! For more information and registration, see https://ambar.org/ai.
If you have questions about superintelligence legal risks and your business is developing or operating powerful AI applications, or your nonprofit is working on AI safety and alignment, please contact me here, or call (408) 573-5700. Also, see our resources page on superintelligence and dangerous AI legal risks.