AI Alignment and Fiduciary Obligation
Benjamin Lange
Why It Matters
What makes this one worth your time
Understanding fiduciary obligations in AI alignment could guide developers in creating more ethically responsible AI systems.
The paper applies fiduciary obligations to AI alignment, focusing on developer responsibilities to users.
Summary
The paper proposes applying fiduciary theory to AI alignment, suggesting that developers owe users duties of loyalty, care, good faith, and candour, which can guide alignment criteria for AI assistants.
Key contributions
- Proposes fiduciary theory as a framework for AI alignment.
- Maps fiduciary duties to user-side risks in AI assistant deployment.
Notable insights
- The application of fiduciary theory to AI alignment offers a novel perspective on developer responsibilities.
- The paper maps user-side risks to fiduciary duties, providing a structured approach to alignment.
Possible limitations
- Not stated in the abstract
Abstract
arXiv:2608.02660v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Advanced AI assistants engage users in extended interactions across a widening range of roles, including advice, decision support, collaboration, learning, emotional support, and companionship among others. Current alignment efforts consider what alignment criteria should govern these relationships, drawing on moral traditions developed for human relationships such as bioethics, virtue ethics, care ethics, and relationship science. This paper considers AI alignment criteria in the user-AI-developer triad, since every user-AI interaction is mediated by a developer who exercises discretionary control over a system's behaviour, memory, and engagement parameters. Drawing on business ethics and legal scholarship, I argue that fiduciary theory applies to extended AI assistant deployment. On this basis, the four canonical fiduciary duties of loyalty, care, good faith, and candour can generate alignment criteria for the developer-user relationship. I map four user-side risks of extended AI assistant deployment to the four duties and specify institutional measures that follow from discharging each duty. The discussion complements existing approaches by grounding alignment criteria in obligations the developer owes the user, rather than in values the user-AI interaction should promote, and by showing that those obligations hold independently of any \textit{de facto} harm to users.