Proceedings of the 2025 Workshop on Law-Following AI
This piece was originally published by The Lawfare Institute.
Abstract
The inaugural Workshop on Law-Following AI (LFAI), hosted by the Institute for Law & AI at the University of Cambridge from August 6–8, 2025 with support from the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence and the UK’s Advanced Research & Innovation Agency, convened more than forty scholars from law, computer science, and related disciplines to advance the emerging research agenda around LFAI: a concept denoting agentic AI systems designed to refuse illegal orders and illegal means, the corresponding policy proposal to mandate such design in certain deployment contexts, and the interdisciplinary field of inquiry that supports both. Rather than recording consensus, these proceedings synthesize key themes from the workshop’s presentations and discussions, including the promises and limits of liability (particularly for governmental AI agents), the state and nuances of automated legal reasoning and evaluation, risks posed by automated compliance and “perfect enforcement,” the appropriate standard of care for AI agents, and the interplay between AI agents and their principals, including fiduciary framings. The report is intended to extend the workshop’s conversations to a broader audience and catalyze further scholarship on LFAI’s design, evaluation, and governance. A full list of report authors can be found at the end of this document.