Aligning Incentives for Leadership, Excellence, and Advancement in Development Act
A BILL
To establish legal standards for advanced artificial intelligence products.
Sec. 2 Findings
Congress finds the following:
Artificial intelligence systems are products that shift decision-making power and responsibility away from humans to software-based systems, often without direct human oversight.
These products, while holding great promise, have caused and will cause harm to businesses and individuals. For example, multiple teenagers have tragically died after being exploited by an artificial intelligence chatbot.
Unpredictable allocations of liability jeopardize public safety and the financial well-being of both individuals and entire industries, particularly the small businesses of the United States, and adversely affect the Federal Government and taxpayers.
Product liability law can help to address harms caused by artificial intelligence systems that affect interstate commerce by incentivizing safety, providing certainty to artificial intelligence developers and deployers to continue to innovate, and ensuring the competitiveness of the United States.
A Federal products liability framework for artificial intelligence systems will remove barriers to interstate commerce and protect individuals’ due process rights.
This Act establishes Federal legislative guidelines for products liability without implicating expressive speech to ensure more predictable legal outcomes for individuals and industries and promotes business innovation.
Sec. 3 Definitions
In this Act:
Artificial intelligence system—
In general— The term artificial intelligence system means any software, data system, application, tool, or utility—
that is capable of making or facilitating predictions, recommendations, actions, or decisions for a given set of human-or machine-defined objectives; and
that uses machine learning algorithms, statistical or symbolic models, or other algorithmic or computational methods (whether dynamic or static) that affect or facilitate actions or decision-making in real or virtual environments.
Inclusion— An artificial intelligence system may be integrated into, or operate in conjunction with, other hardware or software.
Claimant— The term claimant means any person, including a class of persons, who brings a liability action.
Covered product— The term covered product means an artificial intelligence system.
Deployer— The term deployer means a person, including a developer, who uses or operates a covered product for—
the person's own personal or commercial use; or
use by a third party.
Design— The term design, with respect to a covered product—
means the intended or known material characteristics of the covered product; and
includes—
any intended or known formulation of the covered product and the usual result of the intended development or other processes used to produce the covered product, including unexpected skills or behaviors that appear in the covered product;
the selection of any data used for training a covered product through fitting its learnable parameters; and
training, testing, auditing, and fine-tuning the covered product.
Developer— The term developer means a person who designs, codes, produces, owns, or substantially modifies a covered product for—
the person's own personal or commercial use; or
use by a third party.
Express warranty— The term express warranty means any material, positive statement, affirmation of fact, promise, or description relating to a covered product, including any sample or model of a covered product.
Harm— The term harm means, with respect to the effect of the use of a covered product—
damage to property other than the covered product itself;
personal physical injury, illness, or death;
financial or reputational injury;
mental or psychological anguish, emotional distress, or distortion of a person’s behavior that would be highly offensive to a reasonable person; or
any loss of consortium or services or other loss deriving from any type of harm described in subparagraph (A), (B), (C), or (D).
Liability action— The term liability action means a civil action brought under section 301 based on any theory for harm caused by a covered product or covered product use.
Person— The person means any individual, corporation, company, association, firm, partnership, society, joint stock company, or other entity, including any government entity or unincorporated association of persons.
Substantial modification— The term substantial modification, with respect to a covered product—
means any deliberate change made to the covered product by a deployer that—
was not authorized or reasonably anticipated by the developer when the covered product left the control of the developer; and
changes the purpose, use, function, design, or intended use or manner of use of the covered product from that for which the covered product was originally designed, tested, or intended; and
does not include a modification that solely reduces or mitigates a new or additional risk.
Under a legal disability— The term under a legal disability, with respect to a person, means the person lacks the capacity to understand, make, or communicate decisions regarding the person's legal rights—
because of a mental illness or intellectual disability; or
because the person is under the age of 18.