AI Product & Policy Counseling: From Design to Deployment

Catalog description

This course examines how product and policy legal counsel who work inside or who advise technology companies and frontier AI labs develop the rules that touch the lives of billions of people. Students will explore how these lawyers advise product and engineering teams on questions such as how AI systems handle politically contested questions, how minors interact with chatbots, when personalization becomes manipulation, how much authority to grant AI agents, and how to govern likeness, voice cloning, and deepfakes. The class will trace this work across three phases of the AI lifecycle: training data, development and evaluation, and deployment. Topics will range from free expression, intellectual property, and national security to scaled persuasion, youth wellbeing, agentic deployment in regulated industries, and artificial general intelligence (AGI). The course will also consider how a fast-growing body of litigation, from copyright suits to product-liability claims, is reshaping what legal advice lawyers provide to engineering, product, and policy teams. Along with the faculty, guest speakers from leading AI labs will present on these topics, followed by a discussion. In each class, students will assume the role of counsel and work through a real policy exercise: what to restrict, what to approve, and what safeguards to build. Students will leave the course with an understanding of the central role lawyers play in shaping frontier AI from inside the companies building it, and how they can do that work responsibly. Elements used in grading: Attendance, Class Participation, Exam: In-class Final. CONSENT APPLICATION: To apply for this course, students must complete and submit a Consent Application Form available at TBA by 11:59pm TBA. Applications received after the deadline will be reviewed on a rolling basis until the class is full. Cross-listed with International…