← Back to Faculty Directory
Peter N. Salib
Associate Professor
W. Ronald Robins Endowed Professor of Law
Biography
Peter N. Salib is the W. Ronald Robins Endowed Professor and an Associate Professor of Law (with tenure) at the University of Houston. He is also Founder and Executive Co-Director of the Center for Law & AI Risk, a Law and Policy Advisor to the Center for AI Safety, a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Institute for Law & AI, and a Contributing Editor at Lawfare. He was previously a Senior Visiting Scholar at Forethought.
Peter's research investigates what law and legal institutions can do to help reduce existential and other societal-scale risk from advanced AI systems. He is particularly interested in the model of law as an alignment technology. Rule-of-law systems already produce game-theoretic equilibria in which powerful, misaligned agents — corporations, states — have incentives against bad behavior. Peter is developing frameworks for extending law to powerful AIs, giving them legal rights and duties, to similarly incentivize prosociality.
Peter's legal scholarship has been published in the University of Chicago Law Review, Virginia Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review, Texas Law Review, and the Washington University Law Review, among others. He has a book on AI rights forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. He also does empirical research on AI behavior, which is forthcoming with AIES.
Before becoming a law professor, Peter practiced law at Sidley Austin and clerked for the Honorable Frank H. Easterbrook.
Peter's research investigates what law and legal institutions can do to help reduce existential and other societal-scale risk from advanced AI systems. He is particularly interested in the model of law as an alignment technology. Rule-of-law systems already produce game-theoretic equilibria in which powerful, misaligned agents — corporations, states — have incentives against bad behavior. Peter is developing frameworks for extending law to powerful AIs, giving them legal rights and duties, to similarly incentivize prosociality.
Peter's legal scholarship has been published in the University of Chicago Law Review, Virginia Law Review, Michigan Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review, Texas Law Review, and the Washington University Law Review, among others. He has a book on AI rights forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. He also does empirical research on AI behavior, which is forthcoming with AIES.
Before becoming a law professor, Peter practiced law at Sidley Austin and clerked for the Honorable Frank H. Easterbrook.
