Touro College & University System is a private Jewish university system founded in 1970 by Rabbi Dr. Bernard Lander, headquartered in New York City and serving approximately 20,500 students across more than 38 schools in the US and abroad. Its AI safety-relevant work centers on Touro Law Center Professor Gabriel Weil, whose scholarship explores how tort law and liability frameworks can be structured to create economic incentives for AI developers to reduce catastrophic and existential risks from advanced AI systems. Open Philanthropy awarded Touro a $19,783 grant in May 2024 specifically to support this legal research program.
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- $826,603,000
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Theory of Change
Touro's AI safety theory of change, as embodied in Professor Gabriel Weil's research, is that improving legal liability frameworks can create strong financial incentives for AI developers to invest in safety and risk reduction. The causal chain is: legal scholarship identifies reforms to tort law (strict liability, novel punitive damages, mandatory insurance) that make AI companies financially responsible for catastrophic harms even before those harms occur; this scholarship influences legislators, regulators, and courts; improved liability rules force AI developers to internalize the expected costs of catastrophic outcomes; and this in turn shifts incentives toward safer development practices, reducing the probability of AI-caused mass harm or extinction-level events.
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from Open Philanthropy
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Details
- Last Updated
- Apr 2, 2026, 9:54 PM UTC
- Created
- Mar 20, 2026, 2:34 AM UTC