AIs Hacking the Law
Schneier on Security ·
In both a 2021 essay and my 2022 book, A Hacker’s Mind , I talk about AIs finding vulnerabilities and exploits—hacking—the legal system.
Here’s some demonstrations of this from Germany:
Legal systems encode the foundations of social order in natural language. Similar to computer systems, the written law can contain vulnerabilities that invite exploitation.1 Courts absorb most exploits through interpretation, and such vulnerabilities rarely surface in the first place. With highly capable AI systems enabling the discovery of vulnerabilities at unprecedented scale, we believe the latter could change.
In testing this hypothesis, we have identified a substantial number of vulnerabilities in the German legal system using LLMs. To our knowledge, none of these have been previously recorded. We share a selection of vulnerabilities below, and present potential exploits for each. We share only those vulnerabilities whose exploitation we believe would not cause serious harm.
We believe that with cheap legal reasoning proliferating, AI systems could jeopardize the functioning of today’s legal systems. In such a world, lawmakers would need to significantly harden the process of legislation, for example by leveraging advanced AI themselves.
Still in its early stages, but definitely something that’s coming.