I work on the law of transformative AI. My research investigates how legal institutions can help to reduce catastrophic and other societal-scale risks from highly capable AIs. Recently, I have argued that, in addition to technical safety training, humans should use legal and economic incentives to shape AIs’ behavior. By granting AIs certain legal rights and duties—as we do with other non-human agents, like corporations—we could give them instrumental reasons to act safely and prosocially.

I also write about optimal safety regulation for the AI industry, the constitutional barriers to such regulation, AI geopolitics, new approaches to technical AI alignment, and how the post-AGI economy will affect ordinary humans.

My scholarship appears in the University of Chicago Law Review, Virginia Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review, Texas Law Review, and Washington University Law Review, among others, and in peer-reviewed venues including AIES and AI & Society. My book on AI rights, co-authored with Simon Goldstein, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press.

I am the W. Ronald Robins Professor of Law and Associate Professor of Law (with tenure) at the University of Houston Law Center, and Founder and Executive Co-Director of the Center for Law & AI Risk. I am also currently a Law and Policy Advisor to the Center for AI Safety, a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Institute for Law & AI, and a Contributing Editor at Lawfare. Recently, I was a Senior Visiting Scholar at Forethought. Before I became an academic, I was a Climenko Fellow at Harvard Law School, practiced at Sidley Austin, and clerked for Judge Frank H. Easterbrook. You can reach me at psalib@central.uh.edu.