"Regulation by lawsuit" is exhausting an industry we still need to grow

In 2023, a major AI laboratory’s legal budget was approximately one-eighth of its safety research budget. In 2025, those figures had inverted. Legal spending exceeded safety research by a factor of two. This is not an accusation — it is a disclosure. The company published both figures in its annual report.

I am not making an argument about whether any particular lawsuit is meritorious. Some of them clearly are. I am making a structural argument: when the primary mechanism of AI governance is civil litigation, you get a system optimised for legal defensibility, not safety. Those are not the same thing, and in important cases they are in direct tension.