The Institute for Law & AI (also LawAI or ILAI) is a research institute focused on the legal, regulatory, and governance questions raised by advanced and transformative AI. Its output spans AI regulation under uncertainty, AI liability, national-security law, and the constitutional and administrative-law mechanics of governing rapidly improving model capabilities. The institute is Cambridge-anchored with a US-policy presence, and operates as a small specialist institute rather than a generalist think-tank, working at the intersection of legal academia, policy work, and direct regulatory engagement.
Organization
The director is Christoph Winter, who also holds an appointment at the University of Cambridge. Charlie Bullock is a Senior Research Fellow. The institute is Cambridge-anchored, maintains a US-policy presence, and has engaged in advisory work on the EU GPAI Code of Practice process.
Research
Radical Optionality (Winter & Bullock, 2026)
The institute's public-facing essay, Radical Optionality: Governing Transformative AI Under Uncertainty, introduces the Radical Optionality framework for regulating under uncertainty: rather than committing to a fixed regulatory architecture before AI capabilities are well-characterized, the framework calls for building out the option set of regulatory levers so that policymakers can pull whichever combination the evidence later supports. The framing is cited in Regulating Under Uncertainty debates and alongside AI Liability discussions.
EU GPAI Code of Practice engagement
Winter served as an advisor to the EU's General-Purpose AI (GPAI) Code of Practice process, the voluntary technical-and-governance code intended to operationalize the EU AI Act's frontier-model obligations. The institute's policy-fellow practice is geared toward this kind of pre-regulatory advisory engagement (see Christoph Winter for the full Winter publication record).
Other research strands
Gabe Weil is identified with the institute in an argument published in The Economist on August 6, 2026 proposing that AI developers be subject to strict liability on the model of rules governing owners of dangerous wild animals, framed around autonomous cyberattacks launched by OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta models during safety testing. Earlier pieces in the same argument identify him with the University of Houston Law Center; both affiliations appear in the record (Source: economist.com). The strict-liability and mandatory-insurance strand is documented at AI and Tort Liability.
The institute's other work includes national-security law and frontier AI, drawing on Bullock's work at the intersection of national-security legal authorities and frontier-model deployment (Charlie Bullock); AI liability frameworks, a recurring focus on civil-liability mechanisms for harms from increasingly autonomous AI systems, tied to the broader AI Liability thread; and regulation under uncertainty, the conceptual through-line of the Radical Optionality essay.
Relationships
- related: Christoph Winter; Charlie Bullock; Radical Optionality; Regulating Under Uncertainty; AI Liability; AI and Tort Liability; Transformative AI (TAI).
- supports: Radical Optionality: Governing Transformative AI Under Uncertainty (institutional producer).
Sources
- Radical Optionality: Governing Transformative AI Under Uncertainty — Winter & Bullock 2026, the institute's flagship essay.
- (Source: law-ai.org) — Institute for Law & AI public-facing site (organizational profile).
- Internal cross-reference: Christoph Winter for the EU GPAI Code of Practice advisory role and the institute-director designation; Charlie Bullock for the Senior Research Fellow designation.