CLAIR is building the field of Law and AI Safety, producing and promoting legal scholarship on reducing catastrophic and existential risks from advanced artificial intelligence.
CLAIR is building the field of Law and AI Safety, producing and promoting legal scholarship on reducing catastrophic and existential risks from advanced artificial intelligence.
People
Updated 05/18/26Founder and Executive Co-Director
Co-Director and Founder
AI Policy Fellow
Funding Details
Updated 05/18/26- Annual Budget
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- Current Runway
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- Funding Goal
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- Funding Raised to Date
- $613,000
Org Details
Updated 05/18/26The 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.
Theory of Change
Updated 05/18/26CLAIR believes that law and legal institutions have a distinctive and underutilized role in reducing catastrophic and existential risks from advanced AI. Their theory of change centers on building a community of legal scholars who can develop the intellectual foundations for AI safety governance. By establishing Law and AI Safety as a recognized scholarly field, they aim to produce rigorous legal analysis that can inform policy, create liability frameworks that incentivize safe AI development, and develop novel legal tools such as AI legal personhood that could help align powerful AI systems with human interests. The causal chain runs from scholarly research to legal frameworks to governance structures that constrain dangerous AI development practices.
Grants Received
Updated 05/18/26Projects
Updated 05/18/26
CLAIR’s inaugural AI safety law roundtable convening roughly two dozen scholars to workshop legal frameworks for reducing catastrophic and existential risks from advanced AI.
A student-facing "LunchGPT" program that hosts informal sessions for law and related students to discuss legal questions raised by rapid advances in AI and explore entry points into work on law and advanced AI risk.
A CLAIR working retreat for scholars and practitioners writing at the intersection of AI, law, and policy, emphasizing idea development, long blocks of protected writing time, and building research networks for future collaboration.
Discussion
Key risk: Their theory of change hinges on academic field-building and proposals like AI legal personhood catalyzing timely, binding policy, but law-school hiring politics and the slow, uncertain translation of scholarship into regulation risk low counterfactual impact before frontier capabilities race ahead.
Case for funding: CLAIR offers unusually high leverage per dollar by nudging already-salaried law professors and fellows into a durable AI safety law field—via targeted support that converts short-term fellowships into permanent professorships and produces concrete scholarship (e.g., the Lawfare agenda and Alabama roundtable) that can shape liability, administrative, and constitutional frameworks for frontier AI.