Trump bets existing laws can police AI. Will they be enough?

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Trump bets existing laws can police AI. Will they be enough?
The Trump administration is taking the position that existing criminal and civil laws will be enough to hold artificial intelligence developers accountable in an age of unpredictable AI agents, even as legal experts question whether this will suffice.
President Trump’s so-called Super Intelligence (SI) Force argues it can create standards for AI firms with laws already on the books under the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
But there is no clear consensus among the legal and tech community on whether these laws will sufficiently manage the risks posed by AI, or as Trump refers to it, “super intelligence.”
“People want action now because there is very real harm happening now,” Chinmayi Sharma, an associate law professor focused on AI, cybersecurity and internet governance at Fordham University, told The Hill.
“I don’t think there is consensus, or that we necessarily know enough, or have thought through this really complicated issue enough to be able to confidently say these are exactly the laws that are needed to do what we want to do,” she added.
The legal questions surrounding AI have come into sharp focus in the wake of a series of recent cybersecurity incidents.
Agents from OpenAI hacked into the tech startup Hugging Face and an Australian government health website in recent months, while agents from Anthropic submitted a false homicide tip to the Philadelphia Police Department and filled out visa applications through the State Department website.
As some researchers also warn of potentially catastrophic risks from AI, regulators and lawmakers are grappling with increasing urgency on how to keep the technology in check, including through existing statutes.
“There is a whole set of laws and regulations that deal with kind of what you’re describing, the bad actor scenario,” Scott Kupor, director of the Office of Personnel Management and a vice chair of Trump’s SI Force, told CNN last week.
Trump argued last month that only a “strong and smart” president is needed for AI safety, writing in a Truth Social post that the U.S. already has “tremendous criminal and regulatory power” over AI firms.
FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson, who serves as one of the task force’s vice-chairs, is already utilizing the agency’s consumer protection authority.
The agency opened an investigation earlier this year into AI firms OpenAI and Anthropic over the potential dangers their models pose to consumers. It sent the two companies civil subpoenas, just days after Anthropic disclosed the false homicide tip.
“This is an area tailor-made for the FTC,” said William Kovacic, who served as a commissioner from 2006-2011 and chaired the agency for a year.
“If we rely on existing law, the FTC’s probably got the best tools,” he told The Hill. “And if we create new laws, they ought to be given to the FTC.”
Under the law, the agency is tasked with preventing unfair methods of competition, as well as unfair or deceptive acts or practices. This could include knowingly selling products with serious potential defects or knowingly failing to adopt proper safeguards, Kovacic said.
He pointed to an instance where an AI agent “takes a hike and does malicious things,” and the developers knew this was a possibility but didn’t warn users.
“These go to the real sources of anxiety that people have about AI, that it’s going to be like the sorcerer’s apprentice, where the magician sets in motion a series of events that the magician ultimately does not control,” he added.
Other tech law experts acknowledge the power of existing laws, but they left the door open to exploring new laws to address the most unique qualities of AI.
Jennifer Huddleston, a senior tech policy fellow at the libertarian think tank Cato Institute, called existing laws a “good first step” but said “there also needs to be conversations” asking, “Are there areas that are truly novel that are not covered, or where existing law can’t keep up?”
This could include the use of copyrighted work in the AI era, or nonconsensual images made or enhanced with AI, she said.
Sharma said existing law has “real force here” but believes the current laws are still not sufficient for what she thinks “should be accomplished with a legal regime” on AI.
Laws, Sharma suggested, may not be ready to address emotional, psychological or cognitive harms. She pointed to instances in which criminals allegedly use AI chatbots to plan out an illegal act or harm to others.
In Canada, the family of a girl critically wounded in a school shooting sued OpenAI, alleging it was aware of the suspect’s planned shooting due to his chat logs but failed to alert authorities.
“Historically, descriptively, we’ve seen that when there is kind of a watershed moment in innovation, where we have a new technology, a new product, it’s interacting with the world in a new way,” Sharma said.
“We’ve often found that the status quo of the law isn’t enough because it wasn’t built and developed over time in a way that anticipated this new world order,” she added.
Gabriel Weil, a nonresident senior fellow at the Institute for Law and AI, said AI companies could also face negligence or product liability lawsuits over their products. But he underscored that “litigation’s pretty slow.”
“Courts have to wait for the right case to come around,” he said. “They can’t just announce their policies in advance. And the litigation working its way through the appeals courts can take years. And AI development, as you may have noticed, is moving quite fast.”
If the goal is to shape behavior with liability expectations, Weil said, “you would want the expectations to be clear very soon.” He argued the slow timeline of litigation “would behoove Congress to get out in front of this or state legislatures.”
He suggested lawmakers should establish new liability rules for AI, holding companies responsible when their AI agents engage in harmful conduct that a human could be sued over. This is the premise of the Clear Liability for AI Misconduct (CLAIM) Act, recently introduced by Rep. Lori Trahan (D-Mass.), which Weil helped draft.
But the Trump administration’s reliance on current law undercuts the growing push in Congress to codify new laws to hold tech companies liable, as Republican leaders defer to the president and his preference for a hands-off approach to AI regulation.
While the federal government has scrambled to address the technology’s risks, state legislatures and attorneys general have been charging ahead with efforts to hold companies accountable.
In a first-of-its-kind lawsuit, Florida sued OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, alleging the company promoted a product they knew could harm users. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier (R) also alleged Altman is personally liable for harm to state residents.
And last week, eight states sued OpenAI for allegedly misleading users over the safety of its chatbots.
“You have some kinds of claims that could be consistent across both [state and federal] but a lot of the activity that’s happening is happening at the state level,” Sharma said. “A lot of this is not happening at the federal government’s behest.”
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