Center for Law and AI Risk

The Center for Law & AI Risk (CLAIR) was founded in 2023 by legal scholars Yonathan Arbel and Peter Salib following a gathering of more than 20 legal scholars, policy experts, and AI safety specialists at the Center for AI Safety in San Francisco. CLAIR's mission is to build Law and AI Safety as a recognized scholarly field, producing and promoting scholarship on how law can reduce societal-scale risks from advanced artificial intelligence.

CLAIR is co-directed by Yonathan Arbel, Silver Associate Professor of Law at the University of Alabama School of Law, and Peter Salib, Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Houston Law Center, who also serves as Law and Policy Advisor to the Center for AI Safety. The organization has a small team including AI Policy Fellow Nicholas Felstead.

CLAIR's research agenda spans approximately 50 open questions across legal domains including administrative law approaches to AI regulation, tort liability for AI-caused harms, criminal law implications, international law and cooperation, constitutional law, antitrust, and private law architecture as safety mechanisms. Notable research from affiliated scholars includes work on systemic regulation of AI, AI legal personhood as a safety mechanism, the argument that AI outputs are not protected speech, and proposals for joint international frontier laboratories.

The organization runs several programs to advance its field-building mission. The Inaugural Roundtable on AI Safety Law was held in April 2025 at the University of Alabama, convening roughly two dozen legal academics and researchers. CLAIR hosts a Writers' Retreat providing structured feedback sessions and writing blocks with honoraria for participants. The LunchGPT program offers virtual brown bag sessions for law students exploring the intersection of AI and law. CLAIR co-directors have also given talks at institutions including Harvard Law School.

In its first two years, CLAIR raised $613,000 in philanthropic funding, including $134,000 recommended through the Survival and Flourishing Fund's 2024 S-Process grant round. The Lawfare article co-authored by eight legal scholars in March 2024, titled 'Open Questions in Law and AI Safety: An Emerging Research Agenda,' served as a foundational public statement of CLAIR's research program.