Momentum has been building for the U.S. federal government to impose regulations on artificial intelligence. U.S. President Donald Trump opposes new strictures on the industry, but the public has grown concerned about the potential for the technology to produce catastrophic consequences for the economy and human society more broadly.

Might normal liability law be adequate for regulating AI technology? How does the apocalyptic potential of AI relate to the financial value of AI companies? Does the U.S. government have sufficient expertise to regulate AI?

Momentum has been building for the U.S. federal government to impose regulations on artificial intelligence. U.S. President Donald Trump opposes new strictures on the industry, but the public has grown concerned about the potential for the technology to produce catastrophic consequences for the economy and human society more broadly.

Might normal liability law be adequate for regulating AI technology? How does the apocalyptic potential of AI relate to the financial value of AI companies? Does the U.S. government have sufficient expertise to regulate AI?

Those are just a few of the questions that came up in my recent conversation with FP economics columnist Adam Tooze on the podcast we co-host, Ones and Tooze. What follows is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity. For the full conversation, look for Ones and Tooze wherever you get your podcasts. And check out Adam’s Substack newsletter.

Cameron Abadi: In what ways could we expect liability law and criminal law to mitigate the dangers of AI?

Adam Tooze: Broadly speaking, this could be done probably under negligence, where an actor fails to anticipate foreseeable risk. Product liability could do this, or maybe nuisance. Professional malpractice, contract and consumer protection law—there’s lots of different angles you could go down.

And the full ambiguity of this is brought out by the fact that, after the top guys at OpenAI and Anthropic came out with these apocalyptic warnings and now they want to pace the frontier, not only did the Trump administration dissent, but [CEO] Jensen Huang of Nvidia and Mark Zuckerberg of Meta also dissented from this position. And they argued—Huang put it very, very clearly—the market forces are already there, we don’t need any new laws, we don’t need new regulations. If you build a product or a service and you’re not confident in its functionality, capability, or safety, then don’t release it.

And in legal theory circles, negligence is the way that people are going. And though AI advocates will say the thing about algorithms is they’re not deterministic, so it’s not true that if you put certain inputs in, you’re always going to see the same outputs. And does this pose questions for negligence? The broader position I think is clearly going to dominate, which is if you build a machine as unpredictable as that and put it out in the market with the potential for really dramatic consequences, you’re clearly negligent in doing so.

So a short answer to your question is, yes, it’s already being done with........

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