Corporate Attorneys Navigate Existential AI Risks As Doomsday Talk Intensifies

Growing concern in the US over unchecked and rapidly developing artificial intelligence models is increasing the urgency for companies using AI to put their houses in order, according to a Bloomberg Law report.

 

Warnings from leaders of top AI labs about existential risks posed by the most advanced models mark an inflection point for companies facing competitive pressure to accelerate AI adoption while aggressively re-examining their safety guardrails.

 

Legal counsel are advising companies to mitigate their risks by following core practices: use pioneering AI models from leaders such as Anthropic and OpenAI cautiously, keep a human in the loop, vet vendors and carefully review the level of access to company information given to AI agents. And, they say, companies should not panic.

 

“A lot of people are worried that the sky is falling, and it may be, but our job is to make sure the roof doesn’t cave in,” said Eric Dodson Greenberg, executive vice president and chief legal officer of Cox Media Group.

 

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who published an essay on Saturday urging a slowdown in AI growth, has acknowledged the challenge facing companies. He and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said on Tuesday that companies have only just begun taking advantage of AI and could need more help to make that transformation.

 

Still, at this point, there is no turning back for companies using AI in pursuit of efficiency gains to remain competitive and meet the expectations of their boards and executive teams.

 

“The toothpaste is out of the tube when it comes to AI deployment across companies,” said Virginia Johnson, a partner at OGC, a firm that includes general counsel providing legal help to companies. “That means for the GC, the primary mandate is having proper governance internally to make sure that your use of AI is done according to policies, procedures, proper training, ethical deployment, and managing the risk within your own company.”

 

Uneven Scenario

 

A thorough examination of how companies are keeping AI in check cannot come soon enough. An EY survey released recently pointed to an uneven picture as companies try to balance speed and safety. About half of AI leaders at companies said their organisations had sidestepped AI governance frameworks to deploy AI quickly.

 

It is another warning sign for companies navigating the rapid evolution of AI. “We have to be embracing it through incremental calibrated steps and safe experiments that allow us to move this forward where we’re managing the risk level,” said Cox Media’s Greenberg, who is also a Bloomberg Law columnist.

 

His advice is to think of AI governance as an ongoing process because the technology is constantly changing, as is the way humans interact with it.

 

That means examining exactly where AI is being used within a company, identifying the highest-risk uses, assigning a human owner, vetting vendors and establishing a process for identifying problems, said Jobe Danganan, a former founding enforcement attorney at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau who is now co-founder and CEO of LexText AI, a legal text platform.

 

“You won’t eliminate every risk, but you should understand the risks you’re taking and be able to explain why your safeguards were reasonable,” said Danganan, who previously served as general counsel for financial technology companies.

 

Slowing down could mean that the next frontier model is delayed, potentially leading to higher costs. “There’s going to be more cost in the system that maybe we have to absorb as a customer because OpenAI, Anthropic, etc., are going to have to absorb more cost for governance, pass it along to us possibly,” said Dana Rao, former general counsel and executive vice president of Adobe.

 

“We have to have a hard conversation now about the earnings we just reported, the forecast we just reported. Are they still good? We have to go back to the street. We have to be transparent to our investors,” said Rao, an AI fellow at Fordham University.

 

Still, many companies using standard AI models will be fine, legal leaders said.

 

“Generally speaking, if I’ve successfully deployed today’s version of an LLM, I would feel pretty comfortable saying just keep using it,” Rao said.

 

Shared Responsibility

 

The public nature of the disclosures last weekend could help companies talk more openly about AI risks, said Scott Meyers, chairman and CEO of Akerman LLP.

 

“What it means is that we all need to work together because this goes candidly beyond just helping a company survive or meet its revenue targets,” he said. “The risk here goes far beyond just how it impacts the company, but all of the companies now are aware of what this can mean, both from an external attack plus using agents inside the firewall.”

 

Political leaders have so far differed over when and how Congress should intervene with increased regulation. President Donald Trump has argued against regulation, saying it would help China.

 

Separately, technology leaders such as Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind have advocated for a regulatory body modelled on Finra, which monitors US brokerage firms and stockbrokers.

 

“It’s very much in the US government’s interest to be at the forefront of this conversation and the convener and the drafter. And if they don’t, I do think the industry is going to have to look elsewhere to help them come up with industry standards,” said Beth George, head of US litigation, arbitration and global investigations at Freshfields.