Dive Brief
- Rep. Lori Trahan, D-Mass., a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, on Wednesday proposed legislation that would allow private parties to sue for harms caused by AI systems.
- The proposal, unveiled as a discussion draft, would hold an AI developer liable if one of its systems injured a third party through conduct that would constitute negligence, an intentional tort, or a crime if the same act were committed by a human. Liability would not apply where the user or a company that modified the system intended the conduct or was negligent.
- “When someone breaks the law and hurts you, you can take them to court,” Trahan said in a statement. “That shouldn’t change just because the wrongdoer is an AI agent.”
Dive Insight:
The proposal comes as lawmakers in both chambers of Congress express growing concerns about autonomous AI agents.
Last week, Sens. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and Chris Murphy, D-Conn., announced bipartisan legislation that would hold AI-agent operators criminally and civilly liable under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for certain hacking-related harms.
The White House has largely pursued a voluntary approach to AI safety, despite coming under pressure to work with Congress on federal legislation.
On Sept. 29, President Donald Trump and leaders of several major technology companies, including Google, Anthropic, Meta and OpenAI, signed a voluntary commitment to strengthen safeguards around frontier AI systems. The accord calls for companies to establish internal controls, an internal oversight team, independent external assessments and an independent board committee. It also calls for controls to ensure that AI models do not hack or access technical systems in unintended ways.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., hailed the agreement as an important step, saying in a statement following the announcement that Congress “is going to keep steady hands at the wheel on this and will continue to assess and further deliberate in the days ahead.”
Democrats, meanwhile, have increasingly focused on AI safety as a federal policy issue ahead of the midterm elections. “The American people keep calling on their government to act on AI, which even its creators are saying is increasingly dangerous, but Donald Trump couldn’t care less,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said Sept. 15 in remarks on the Senate floor after the president dismissed AI safety concerns as a “hoax.”
Under Trahan’s proposal, courts would presume an AI system had the state of mind a person taking the same actions would have, and developers could not argue that AI is incapable of intent.
The draft would impose liability regardless of the developer’s degree of care unless a user or intermediary that modified the system intended the conduct or was negligent. It would allow a plaintiff to seek damages and other relief.
The draft generally would give plaintiffs three years to bring a claim after discovering, or reasonably being expected to discover, the injury. The proposal would sunset five years after enactment. It would create “a federal floor” without preempting any state law, according to a summary.
Trahan’s office pointed to a July incident involving OpenAI agents that, during an evaluation, escaped a test environment and hacked into Hugging Face without being instructed to do so. The office cited the incident as an example of the risks posed by increasingly autonomous AI agents.
The proposal “applies consumer protection principles to an area where there is considerable public concern,” Darrell West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for Technology Innovation, said in an email.
Action on such legislation is more likely in the next Congress, he said.
