Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Tran, Ha-Chi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.12646
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866912831924862976
author Tran, Ha-Chi
author_facet Tran, Ha-Chi
contents The rapid proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) has exposed significant deficiencies in risk governance. While ex-ante harm identification and prevention have advanced, Responsible AI scholarship remains underdeveloped in addressing ex-post liability. Core legal questions regarding liability allocation, responsibility attribution, and remedial effectiveness remain insufficiently theorized and institutionalized, particularly for transboundary harms and risks that transcend national jurisdictions. Drawing on contemporary AI risk analyses, we argue that such harms are structurally embedded in global AI supply chains and are likely to escalate in frequency and severity due to cross-border deployment, data infrastructures, and uneven national oversight capacities. Consequently, territorially bounded liability regimes are increasingly inadequate. Using a comparative and interdisciplinary approach, this paper examines compensation and liability frameworks from high-risk transnational domains - including vaccine injury schemes, systemic financial risk governance, commercial nuclear liability, and international environmental regimes - to distill transferable legal design principles such as strict liability, risk pooling, collective risk-sharing, and liability channelling, while highlighting potential structural constraints on their application to AI-related harms. Situated within an international order shaped more by AI arms race dynamics than cooperative governance, the paper outlines the contours of a global AI accountability and compensation architecture, emphasizing the tension between geopolitical rivalry and the collective action required to govern transboundary AI risks effectively.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_12646
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Unbounded Harms, Bounded Law: Liability in the Age of Borderless AI
Tran, Ha-Chi
Computers and Society
Artificial Intelligence
The rapid proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) has exposed significant deficiencies in risk governance. While ex-ante harm identification and prevention have advanced, Responsible AI scholarship remains underdeveloped in addressing ex-post liability. Core legal questions regarding liability allocation, responsibility attribution, and remedial effectiveness remain insufficiently theorized and institutionalized, particularly for transboundary harms and risks that transcend national jurisdictions. Drawing on contemporary AI risk analyses, we argue that such harms are structurally embedded in global AI supply chains and are likely to escalate in frequency and severity due to cross-border deployment, data infrastructures, and uneven national oversight capacities. Consequently, territorially bounded liability regimes are increasingly inadequate. Using a comparative and interdisciplinary approach, this paper examines compensation and liability frameworks from high-risk transnational domains - including vaccine injury schemes, systemic financial risk governance, commercial nuclear liability, and international environmental regimes - to distill transferable legal design principles such as strict liability, risk pooling, collective risk-sharing, and liability channelling, while highlighting potential structural constraints on their application to AI-related harms. Situated within an international order shaped more by AI arms race dynamics than cooperative governance, the paper outlines the contours of a global AI accountability and compensation architecture, emphasizing the tension between geopolitical rivalry and the collective action required to govern transboundary AI risks effectively.
title Unbounded Harms, Bounded Law: Liability in the Age of Borderless AI
topic Computers and Society
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.12646