One of the fundamental aspects of AI governance is how you engage with suppliers who provide or implement AI solutions for your business, as well as how you interact with your customers when introducing AI features into your service(s). The key to managing these interactions lies in well-crafted agreements and terms of service.
As more and more companies explore, procure, develop, and deploy AI, a wide range of contracts will increasingly touch on AI-specific issues. This is forcing a re-think of whether existing contractual frameworks remain fit for purpose in the generative AI age.
In the absence of clear answers to some of the pressing intellectual property concerns and a well-defined regulatory landscape, it is the rapid advancements in technology and market forces that are driving changes in the contractual terms.
Therefore, away from the exciting headlines about the EU's AI Act or the latest AI IP lawsuit, commercial lawyers face the less glamorous task of having to re-evaluate whether existing contractual frameworks adequately mitigate risks associated with AI deployments. To delve deeper into this topic, please see below for a copy of our article in the Journal of Robotics, Artificial Intelligence & Law.
In this article, Roch discusses adapting existing contractual frameworks to ensure that they remain fit for purpose in the generative AI age, and offers five suggestions to help de-risk contracts with suppliers of AI services.
On the one hand, you may be tempted to lean on broad, generic provisions such as requiring the supplier to provide the AI tool “in accordance with good industry practice.” On the other hand, you could also seek to impose detailed, specific obligations mandating transparency, explainability, and auditability of the supplier’s AI tool and associated training data. However, neither approach works particularly well.
