Compiled by Sarah Willrich.
Articles
Who Writes the AI Constitution?
Nicolas McMullan and Kevin Frazier discussed what regulation of artificial intelligence (AI) constitutions—documents that contain sets of principles, values, and/or rules that AI models should follow—could look like. McMullan and Frazier argued that AI constitutions contain speech protected by the First Amendment, which limits how far the government can go in regulating them, and considered what more narrow approaches the government could utilize instead, such as requiring certain disclosures, exercising its leverage as a purchaser of AI models, or mandating provisions against criminal conduct.
A constitution, though, is written by identified (or identifiable) people, published under a company’s name, and read and (increasingly) argued over by the public as a statement of values. The expressive interest sits with the humans who write these AI constitutions, whatever statistical use the training process later makes of the text. A values-rich constitution is thus about as unattenuated as anything in the industry. Many of the things that inform model character and behavior are unpredictable, which has bedeviled machine learning scholars for decades. Constitutional AI is an unusual technique in that it allows human authors to act with intentionality ex ante on model character, rather than the more typical process of nudging AI outputs ex post with techniques such as RLHF or safeguards on model APIs.
Exxon v. CIMEX and the Erosion of Foreign Sovereign Immunity
Annie Brett and Cory A. Evans explained the history leading up to the Supreme Court’s recent decision holding that Cuba’s CIMEX cannot invoke sovereign immunity to block Exxon’s suit against it, which alleges that CIMEX continues to traffic in and profit from property nationalized by Cuba in 1959. They broke down the case’s core question: whether Title III of the Helms-Burton Act implicitly abrogates Cuba’s sovereign immunity, and argued that the decision erodes the U.S.’s commitments to respecting sovereign immunity and international law more broadly.
With Exxon, the Court has held that Congress can abrogate foreign sovereign immunity without specifically clarifying that it intends to do so. In this way, foreign sovereign immunity is just another legislative privilege, albeit a very strong one based on a special category of international legal recognition.
This philosophical attitude has consequences. Although the United States has been the most powerful country in the world for many decades, following World War II the United States has historically tried to wield its legal leadership through multilateral institutions, when possible, rather than through unilateral demands.
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