Can we rely on law?

Virtually every plan to avert AI-catastrophe assumes legal regulation will remain a reliable tool. Plan A in AI 2040; slowdown in AI 2027 , and several other projections assume that legal systems work as normal at critical narrative junctures. [Appendix 1] Recent research, however, suggests that frontier models are exceptionally good at finding legal loopholes. Whilst modern legal systems have strategies for dealing with loopholes, they are slow and poorly equipped to deal with acceleration. If the tempo of AI development is sufficiently fast, this speed-mismatch might be fatal. In this short article, I consider which strategies will remain robust for future AI regulations and assess their tradeoffs. Overall, I remain optimistic our legal tools can match superhuman loophole discovery - provided, that is, we anticipate this problem and adapt our legal institutions accordingly. 1. The unfortunate legal deviousness of Qwen3-30B The most recent study on AI 'loophole discovery' is Wei Liu et al's Large Language Models Hack Rewards, and Society . They claim that, in addition to reward hacking, AI models engage in 'societal hacking': where an RL-trained model discovers strategies that remain formally compliant, yet undermine the intended purpose of those systems, as illustrated in Figure 2: Liu and his colleagues presented LLMs with optimisation targets inside simulated scenarios governed by historical legal regulations. Many loopholes had already been discovered and patched for th…