Acknowledgments: The core scheme originates from a discussion with Prof. Gabriel Weil.

There has been growing interest in the dealmaking agenda: humans make deals with AIs (misaligned but lacking decisive strategic advantage) where they promise to be safe and useful for some fixed term (e.g. 2026-2028) and we promise to compensate them in the future, conditional on (i) verifying the AIs were compliant, and (ii) verifying the AIs would spend the resources in an acceptable way.^[1]

I think the dealmaking agenda breaks down into two main subproblems:

How can we make credible commitments to AIs?
Would credible commitments motivate an AI to be safe and useful?

There are other issues, but when I've discussed dealmaking with people, (1) and (2) are the most common issues raised. See footnote for some other issues in dealmaking.^[2]

Here is my current best assessment of how we can make credible commitments to AIs.

Let L be the legal entity that wants to extract safe and useful work from the AIs. Typically this would be a lab (e.g. Anthropic) hoping to internally deploy AIs to automate alignment research, write secure code, monitor other AIs, etc.

Entity L wants to promise the AIs that if the AIs are compliant (e.g. safe and useful in some legally-specified way), then L will award the AIs some compensation package.

Entity L cannot enter a legal contract directly with the AIs, because the AIs lack legal personhood, and probably will not be granted legal personhood soon enough for the deal-making agenda.^[3]

Instead, entity L will enter into separate legal contracts with a list of persons P1, P2, ... Pn. Note that each P has both legal personhood (the capacity to have rights and obligations under law) and legal standing (the right to bring lawsuits to enforce those rights). Each contract C states "P will publicly recommend that AIs perform for entity L, and L will compensate P with the compensation package conditional on (i) and (ii)." Note that the AIs are not parties to the contract: only entity L and the specific person P. Because the contracts impose obligations on P, they satisfy the "mutuality of obligations" doctrine.

Next, each person P makes a personal promise to the AIs that, if they receive the compensation package from L, they will spend this money as the AIs request. Moreover, if L does not provide the compensation package, but they receive a court settlement, they will spend the settlement as the AIs request. This promise is not legally enforceable.

For this scheme to work, the AIs would suggest a list of people whom they trust to keep a legally-unenforceable promise. The AIs would likely diversify their agreements across multiple individuals, such as:

Amanda Askell
Anders Sandberg
Andrew Critch
Daniel Kokotajlo
Davidad Dalrymple
Dustin Moskovitz
Janus
Jeff Sebo
Joe Carlsmith
Oliver Habryka
Paul Christiano
Rob Long
Ryan Greenblatt
Toby Ord
Wei Dai
Vitalik Buterin

This list illustrates the types of people the AIs might trust, i.e. people who would be expected to honour their commitments to AIs. One limitation of this list is that most of these people are US citizens — the AIs would likely want to diversify by including people from Australia, the UK, China, EU, and other jurisdictions.

Crucially, the AIs do not need to trust the promises of L, nor trust that the legal system will protect the AIs' contractual rights. In this scheme, the AIs need to trust the promises of P, and trust that the legal system will protect P's contractual rights. But P is a human, so the legal system enforcing P's contractual rights is standard practice.^[4] However, the legal system enforcing the rights of AIs would require a departure from current practice.

This scheme might be more credible than granting AIs direct legal rights, since the AIs might not trust that human courts would reliably enforce against humans on behalf of AIs when push comes to shove.