AI could break legal systems by finding previously hidden loopholes
Turns out legislation may have bugs, too
Researchers argue that artificial intelligence could disrupt legal systems by discovering previously unnoticed loopholes in legal codes. Felix Ringe, a visiting fellow at Stanford Law School’s liftlab, suggests that large language models (LLMs) have become powerful enough to identify exploitable inconsistencies in legal texts at scale.
He compares laws to code, arguing that both contain formatting details and rituals. However, courts cannot be relied upon as a deterministic runtime environment. Ringe and collaborator Linus Folkerts point to recent work that frames laws as vulnerable code. They argue that AI could surface statutory gaps at a scale that may bring chaos to the legal world.
To demonstrate this, they cite several potential gaps in German law, including an amendment to the Occupational Diseases Regulation that omits a required reference, and a transit visa rule that may be invalid due to a missing authority. They believe that with cheap legal reasoning proliferating, AI could jeopardize the functioning of today’s legal systems.
Written by urgent.news from The Register's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
