Legislation and regulation development

Definition

Turn policy ideas into specific rules that can be legally enforced, and usually some powers to enforce them.

Additional Information

As well as selecting policies to implement, this also includes: - Deciding whether to legislate, use existing legal powers or use non-legal powers (negotiating voluntary commitments) - Fleshing out practices into things that can be implemented, e.g. if we want [responsible disclosure programmes](https://adamjones.me/blog/ai-regulator-toolbox/#responsible-disclosure-programmes) to be required by law we need to legally define all these concepts, what specific requirements or offences are, what penalties for non-compliance are, and give legal powers to a regulator to investigate, enforce and support compliance (and update any existing laws where they might conflict). - Deciding how specific legislation and regulation should be: often with tech regulation there’s a balance between covering things in the future, and being able to be specific now (which is useful both for regulators so it’s clear when they can and can’t enforce things, and also for AI companies so they know what they can and can’t do). - Keeping legislation up to date. For example, tasking a body to review the legislation after a period of time, and providing mechanisms for easier updates (such as pointing to standards which can be updated, or allowing the executive to create secondary legislation such as statutory instruments). - Harmonising legislation and regulations across jurisdictions, to support compliance and enforcement activities. - Minimising [negative side effects of regulation](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6untaSPpsocmkS7Z3/ways-i-expect-ai-regulation-to-increase-extinction-risk).

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