Christoph Winter is the Director of the Institute for Law & AI (ILAI) and an Assistant Professor of Law and AI at the University of Cambridge. His research concerns the legal and institutional governance of advanced artificial intelligence, spanning EU and US law and policy, AI agents, constitutional and administrative law, and the governance of frontier models.
Background and roles
Winter directs the Institute for Law & AI and holds an appointment as Assistant Professor of Law and AI at the University of Cambridge, where he is affiliated with the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence and the Faculty of Law. He previously served as a legal advisor to the EU General-Purpose AI Code of Practice (Source: https://law-ai.org/team/christophwinter/).
Research and publications
Much of Winter's published work is produced through the Institute for Law & AI. It includes:
- Radical Optionality (2026, with Charlie Bullock), which introduces the Radical Optionality approach to governing Transformative AI (TAI) under deep uncertainty; the source page is Radical Optionality: Governing Transformative AI Under Uncertainty.
- Law-Following AI: Designing AI Agents to Obey Human Laws (2025, with Cullen O'Keefe, Ketan Ramakrishnan and Janna Tay), a statement of the Law-Following AI agenda (the source is queued for ingest at
Wiki/queue/INGEST-law-following-ai-okeefe-2025.md). - The Role of Compute Thresholds for AI Governance (2025, with Pistillo, Van Arsdale and Heim).
- The Governance Misspecification Problem (2024, with Charlie Bullock).
- Legal Considerations for Defining "Frontier Model" (2024, with Bullock, Van Arsdale, Arnold and O'Keefe).
- Earlier work on artificial judicial decision-making, including Value Alignment for Advanced Artificial Judicial Intelligence (2022) and The Challenges of Artificial Judicial Decision-Making for Liberal Democracy (2021).
A recurring theme across these works is the treatment of advanced-AI governance as a problem of legal design under uncertainty: building institutions and rules that remain workable when the trajectory of AI capability cannot be forecast, rather than betting governance on any single predicted outcome.
Relationships
- affiliated-with: Institute for Law & AI (Director); University of Cambridge (Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence / Faculty of Law)
- co-author-with: Charlie Bullock
- authored: Radical Optionality: Governing Transformative AI Under Uncertainty
- supports: Radical Optionality, Regulating Under Uncertainty, Transformative AI (TAI), Law-Following AI
Sources
- Radical Optionality: Governing Transformative AI Under Uncertainty — Bullock & Winter, Radical Optionality (2026).
- (Source: https://law-ai.org/team/christophwinter/) — Institute for Law & AI team page (role as Director, Cambridge appointment, EU GPAI Code of Practice advisory role, publication list).