Annual Report 2025

Executive Summary

The Institute for Law & AI (LawAI) engages in three core activities:

• Independent legal research and analysis
• Consulting for governments, academia, and industry
• Field-building through fellowships and events

In 2025, our activities grew substantially. Our core team grew from 20 to 28 staff. Applications to our Seasonal Research Fellowship were 9.5x higher than in 2024. We also launched three flagship events, featuring 200+ participants and 50+ experts and moderators.

Meanwhile, our Director, Christoph Winter, served in a legal advisory role to the European AI Office on the General-Purpose AI Code of Practice. He also testified before the European Parliament, offering recommendations on law-following AI and institutional capacity-building at the European AI Office.

Our US Law & Policy team produced 7 new publications, including a report on mobilizing technical talent into government for AI-related national security crises, and discussed implications of the Executive Order on AI preemption with CNN, the Financial Times, Politico, NBC, and The Verge.

Our Legal Frontiers team published a pioneering research article on law-following AI, and has begun to catalyze a field of technical, legal, and policy research to develop the idea more fully, including through our own subsequent research and our Workshop on Law-Following AI.

In 2026, our work will emphasize “radical optionality”— research and policy approaches designed to preserve flexibility amid uncertainty about AI’s trajectory. Our EU Law team will continue to publish new chapters of the Cambridge Commentary on EU General-Purpose AI Law, while our Legal Frontiers team will expand its new Automated Governance workstream. Our fellowship programs are expanding across all tracks with our inaugural Winter Research Fellowship.