Bloomberg Surveillance · Wednesday, September 16, 2026
The current path of AI development, particularly with large language models, is a long-term mistake due to their complexity and lack of understandability, posing significant safety risks. Professor Stuart Russell argues that liability alone is insufficient to mitigate the risks of AI, especially the loss of control, and emphasizes the need for pre-market safety requirements similar to those for aviation.
“The technology path that the companies chose back around 2018, 2019 was the large language model. as we know, so Chad GPT and Claude. These are gigantic black boxes.”
“So as they're becoming more capable, the problem is that we need the kinds of safety guarantees that we have for nuclear reactors and airplanes and so on, but we just can't get those guarantees because we don't understand... how the technology works.”
“And obviously, liability is not going to deter a company from incurring that risk, because if it does come to pass, there will be nobody around to pay the money and nobody around to receive the money.”
“So we need both. Requirements before a developer has market access, as well as liability after the fact.”