This project was supervised by TGT’s Aaron Scher, but the work was primarily carried out by Alex Mark, a Fellow with the Cambridge Boston Alignment Initiative who is not a MIRI employee. Because it is a mentored project outside TGT’s realm of expertise, and it focuses on a complex topic, the analysis serves as a starting point for future work, rather than the final word on this topic.
Abstract:
Transformative AI systems may pose unprecedented catastrophic risks, but the U.S. Constitution places significant constraints on the government's ability to govern this technology. This paper examines how the First Amendment, administrative law, and the Fourteenth Amendment shape the legal vulnerability of two regulatory proposals: model licensing and AI research classification. While the First Amendment may provide some degree of protection for model algorithms or outputs, this protection does not foreclose regulation. Policymakers must also consider administrative legal requirements, due to both agency review and authority. Finally, while substantive due process and equal protection pose minimal obstacles, procedural due process requires the government to clearly define when developers vest a legal interest in their models. Given this analysis, effective AI governance requires careful implementation to avoid these legal challenges.