WASHINGTON, DC — The Foundation for American Innovation (FAI) is proud to announce the launch of Frontier Legal Defense, a major new effort to secure the technological frontier as artificial intelligence becomes dramatically more powerful in the near future.
Courts will be the defining arena for existential questions about the future of American AI. This is already obvious: battles around government control and lab autonomy, copyright showdowns, and data center litigation are only the beginning. The U.S. legal system and the precedents set there will increasingly take center stage in an era of congressional gridlock and precedent-setting executive action.
In the midst of this, Frontier Legal Defense will be a rapid-response legal team that combats the concentration of power, incumbent rent-seeking, and government overreach in AI that threaten American progress, prosperity, and freedoms. It will conduct the legal advocacy, public interest litigation, and education necessary to counter these many threats.
Beyond this, Frontier Legal Defense aims to foster a new generation of lawyers and legal scholars who grasp the paradigm shift AI implies for both the American legal system and way of life. The hardest problems ahead will demand more than applying old doctrines to new facts; they will require novel approaches built by people who pair fine-tuned legal judgment with a deep understanding of the trajectory of this technology. Lawyers who cannot talk about Kurzweil and RSPs as easily as they chat about common law doctrine and interpretive canons need not apply.
The Frontier Legal Defense project will be led by FAI General Counsel Tim Hwang. Hwang previously served as the General Counsel of Substack, Inflection AI, and Abridge, and was Google’s first global public policy lead for artificial intelligence and machine learning.
“Builders of artificial intelligence have for too long ignored the importance of law and the courts at their peril, and this neglect is now coming home to roost,” said Hwang. “Frontier Legal Defense will be a center for a new generation of lawyers who know in their bones where this technology is headed, and fiercely believe that the law must secure American leadership and the American system as we transition to a post-AGI world.”
The project is recruiting exceptional litigators and the resources to back them. To learn more or to support the work, please contact frontierlegal@thefai.org.
About FAI: The Foundation for American Innovation, a nonpartisan think tank based in Washington, DC, and Silicon Valley, champions the technology, talent, and ideas essential to American prosperity, security, and flourishing. Learn more at thefai.org.
Media Contact: David Bahr, david@thefai.org
