For almost a decade, I led a company whose products people swallowed. If our hair growth supplements caused harm, I was responsible. Not just morally – legally. It kept me awake at night. And that was a good thing. Personal legal responsibility is a powerful tool. It prompts corporate leaders to take the safety of their products seriously, giving consumers confidence in those products. It’s not currently something causing AI leaders to lose sleep. It should be.
Some might think introducing another layer of accountability would stifle innovation. My own experience building what became a multi-billion-dollar company says otherwise. In my industry, the law has long held that the people in charge are personally for the safety of what their companies sell. That accountability was essential to building the consumer trust I needed to make my business a success. It could do the same for AI leaders.
Today, I invest in AI and AI-enabled companies through Great Things™, a new investment model, and my family office. My investments include frontier AI companies such as Anthropic and xAI, infrastructure and compute-related companies such as Positron AI, and AI-enabled science and health platforms such as Lila, which uses AI to accelerate discovery.
I believe AI technologies, if used safely, can help solve some of humanity’s toughest problems and the potential I see in these companies is truly exciting.So I’m putting my capital behind them because I want them to succeed. But as an investor, I’m part of the ecosystem that makes AI innovation possible. And I’ve observed a gap: personal legal accountability.
It’s a gap that needs filling. Executives are currently shielded behind their companies, with corporate financial penalties for misconduct or negligence often amounting to a fraction of their turnover and valuations – just another line item. Responsibility that stops at the corporate entity isn’t responsibility. It’s an expense.
Meanwhile, AI leaders can make decisions from which they personally stand to make billions while risking nothing personally if their mistakes expose us all to danger. That asymmetry is indefensible.
It’s not that nothing is happening. The rules around AI are evolving fast. States across the US are introducing their own AI laws, and Congress is weighing legislation that would impose safety requirements on frontier AI companies. At the end of September, leaders of several of the biggest AI companies went to the White House and signed an accord committing to internal risk controls, independent audits and board-level oversight of safety.
These are welcome steps, as are the safety frameworks leading labs have published. But both the safety frameworks and the accord are voluntary, and when it comes to AI, voluntary isn’t enough. Nothing yet holds the people at the top personally legally accountable.
We have built a legal system in which it is mostly companies that pay but rarely the people who lead them. An AI executive who misstates revenue to investors can be held personally responsible. Yet decisions that could contribute to anything from an individual suicide to large-scale cyberattacks and geopolitical destabilization are made without personal legal jeopardy. We have already seen where that leads in another segment of the tech industry: social media. With AI, the stakes are potentially much higher.
As I know from building Nutrafol, personal liability changes how you run a business. A safety checklist tells you what to test; personal exposure makes you worry about what isn’t on the list. You drive your teams to identify the risks, test for them and put safeguards in place before they become a problem. You make sure problems reach you early rather than allowing them to get smoothed over on the way up. And you’re willing to slow down or say no, even when money or a competitive edge is on the table, because your name is attached to what happens next.
I recognize that asking for personal liability for AI leaders is a significant step. But AI is unlike any other industry. A supplement reaches the people who choose to buy it. AI is becoming embedded in all our lives, whether we’re boarding a plane or turning on the lights. We are all “customers” of AI’s products. AI technologies are built into the systems that we depend on, from power grids to hospitals to the classrooms where our children learn. A single failure could ripple across a city, a country or beyond. And unlike almost any other product, the people building AI have warned that it may one day escape human control. Extraordinary risks call for extraordinary accountability.
To be clear, I’m not arguing that AI executives should be punished for every failure. Just as I could not guarantee that every one of my products was perfect, no one can guarantee that an AI system is safe. But when leaders know their systems pose serious risks and ship them – or release them – anyway, when they inadequately fund their safety teams or ignore their warnings or when they hide problems from regulators and the public, there should be consequences. Not just for the company. For the individuals behind those decisions.
Whether that accountability is civil or criminal is not for me to say. Where the thresholds sit, which harms count, who audits what – that’s for legislators, lawyers, technologists and ethicists to decide. But whatever obligations they land on, a named senior executive should be personally responsible for meeting them. When the people at the top know the risks, what they do next should carry real personal stakes.
I believe AI has the potential to transform everyone’s lives for the better. But like everyone, I’m concerned about its dangers. Personal legal responsibility focuses minds on safety, builds public trust and helps ensure that the race among AI leaders to come out on top doesn’t come at everyone else’s expense. It’s a standard long applied to those making products that go into human bodies. It must now be applied to those making products that could shape the future of humanity itself.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
