According to Gillian Hadfield, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of AI Alignment and Governance, we’re not ready for the AI transformation that’s coming. “Getting AI governance right is crucial, because we’re about to integrate these systems into our societies—the ultimate test of large-scale human cooperation,” Hadfield says. “We’re not looking to the future and asking what governance structures, legal frameworks, and institutions we need to first establish,” she warns. “We’re heading toward a world with millions of AI agents participating with essentially zero legal infrastructure to manage their participation.”
“It’s more than just following societal rules; it requires a deeper understanding of what value those rules have in society.” — Gillian Hadfield
A member of JHU’s Data Science and AI Institute, Hadfield was hired in 2025 as part of a new cluster of BDPs whose research weaves data science, data-driven research, and AI even more fully into the fabric and future of the university. With expertise in technology, law, and institutional economics, her work focuses on ensuring that artificial intelligence follows the ethical norms that allow human societies to thrive. Hadfield approaches the AI alignment problem from both technical and policy perspectives. She is concerned with developing AI systems that can understand and conform to human normative institutions, as well as with establishing the legal and regulatory structures needed to guide AI. Underpinning her work are human normative systems, including social norms, informal dispute resolution, and formal systems of law, which she explains are the fundamental infrastructure of human groups.
Hadfield builds computational models of these systems to ultimately enable AI systems that align with human normative institutions and reasoning. “It’s more than just following societal rules; it requires a deeper understanding of what value those rules have in society,” she says. Her work challenges conventional thinking about how legal rules are made and enforced, and she has become a leading voice in the call to redesign legal infrastructure to serve a globalized and digitally transformed society.
— JAIMIE PATTERSON