Cambridge Research Group on Private Actor Responsibility: 'Hybrid EU - US litigation strategies to address AI human rights harms'

Speaker: Albert Fox Cahn, Esq.

23 February 2026, 17:00-18:30: Old and Findlay Library – Lauterpacht Centre for International Law (tea/coffee/snacks in the Old Library from 17:00).

Sign up is required. In order to ensure in-depth discussion, numbers are capped at 20 attendees, on a first-come, first-served basis. We will operate a waiting list.

A rapidly expanding array of powerful machine learning systems are taking root in nearly every aspect of contemporary life, as governments and companies rush to incorporate automated decision making into fraught areas like policing, healthcare, housing, and employment. While human decision-making in these arenas is subject to robust human rights protections, safeguards from automated decision systems are lagging behind. Even when AI systems make errors, propagate bias, and fail to comply with legal obligations, it’s often unclear how their developers and deployers will be held to account when their systems go awry. Given the numerous political and practical barriers to sufficient public sector intervention against AI firms, there is an urgent need to evaluate the potential role of private litigation in challenging AI tools and the firms that are responsible for them.

While AI firms already face a number of legal challenges from those alleging intellectual property infringement, they have generally evaded liability for the full array of claims that could be asserted. In particular, U.S. litigants have brought relatively few claims for violations of housing, employment, and related civil rights violations, even though many artificial intelligence systems appear to routinely violate applicable federal, state, and local ordinances. One factor is the relative difficulty of litigating AI harms in the U.S., given the high evidentiary showing needed to survive a motion to dismiss and begin discovery. Additionally, many of those subjected to automated decision making in housing, credit, employment, and other protected areas will never know that they were evaluated by an algorithm (let alone the methodology used).

In this session we will look at whether a transatlantic litigation strategy could circumvent the structural barriers for AI litigation. Can EU data access rights provide European plaintiffs the information their American counterparts need to make a colourable civil rights claim? Could European plaintiffs seek meaningful remedies without follow-on litigation from the U.S.? How much would such a litigation strategy be imperilled by the proposed changes of the Digital Omnibus? We will delve into these questions and all the other potential barriers to robust private litigation in this growing area of human rights and concern.

Albert Fox Cahn, Esq. is a visiting scholar practitioner at the Centre of Governance and Human Rights and a visiting scholar at Pembroke College. He is also the founder in residence at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project’s (where he litigated complex class action cases) and a fellow at N.Y.U Law School’s Information Law Institute, Ashoka, and TED. He is the author of more than 150 articles and op-eds and the forthcoming Move Slow and Upgrade (CUP, 2026).

Please direct any questions to Dr Andrew Sanger and/or Professor Henning Grosse Ruse-Khan.