Criminal Justice & the Rule of Law Cybersecurity & Tech

Proceedings of the 2025 Workshop on Law-Following AI

Cullen O'Keefe, Charlie Winter, Matthijs Maas, Janna Tay
Friday, May 8, 2026, 11:08 AM
A report from the inaugural Workshop on Law-Following AI to catalyze further scholarship on its design, evaluation, and governance
Use of cyber attacks in Ukraine (UCSD Jacobs School of Engineering, https://www.sdu.dk/-/media/cws/cws/images/cws-dossiers/ukraine+cyber+attacks.jpeg, CC BY-NC 3.0 US)

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. 

Read the report here or below:


Cullen O'Keefe is the Director of Research at the Institute for Law & AI (LawAI) and a Research Affiliate at the Centre for the Governance of AI. Cullen's research focuses on legal and policy issues arising from general-purpose AI systems, with a focus on risks to public safety, global security, and rule of law. Prior to joining LawAI, he worked in various policy and legal roles at OpenAI over 4.5 years.
Charlie Winter is chief research officer at the open-source intelligence platform ExTrac. He is an associate fellow of the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism in The Hague and a member of the RESOLVE Network’s Advisory Board. He has a Ph.D. in war studies from King’s College London.
Matthijs Maas is a senior research fellow at the Institute for Law & AI and a research affiliate at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge.
Janna Tay is a research scholar at the Institute for Law and AI.
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