Damien Riehl — application for Member of Staff, AI & Rule of Law at Anthropic

01 ⁄ 04

AI safety evaluations · a legal-alignment lens

“…developing frameworks to assess whether frontier AI systems behave consistently with constitutional norms, due process, and rule-of-law principles.”

Law is one of our richest computable records of human values — and I built the open standard (and knowledge graph) that makes it legible to machines.

After working for the world's largest legal-technology company, Thomson Reuters — used by the world's largest firms and corporations — I drew on that experience to lead SALI, the nonprofit legal-data standard, for five years: growing it from ~1,000 tags to 18,000+ and assembling a coalition of the world's largest law firms, the largest legal-tech companies, and the largest corporations (Microsoft among them) to standardize the metadata that classifies everything that matters to the business of law and the practice of law — worldwide (e.g., UK, EU, India, South America, APAC).

SALI and FOLIO make a hard question computable: what does the law actually require, permit, and forbid? They track human values through the lens of legal values: “do not murder” and “do not steal” are at once ethical, moral, and legal — and Murder and Theft sit among the 18,000 tags, in a knowledge graph of legal and normative human values.

02 ⁄ 04

Institutional vulnerability analysis

“…identifying where AI creates novel pressure points in democratic governance, and proposing both policy and technical mitigations.”

Legal by design — because the alternative can break democracy.

When a Stanford professor's expert declaration was caught citing AI-hallucinated cases, a federal court struck it — and quoted my writing on how to do legal AI correctly.

When the rule of law itself came under strain, I organized an open letter supporting the rule of law, signed by more than 650 legal professionals — which Robert Ambrogi covered as the profession moving for change. The Financial Times has recognized my rule-of-law work: I've been selected for the FT Law 50 (2026, to be announced this June in London).

My work has helped systems be legal by design — following both governmental law and ethical and moral principles. Built in this way, systems can do enormous good; built in other ways (e.g., imbued with hidden or nefarious principles) systems can eviscerate democracy. As both a litigator and a systems builder, I can help build the technical systems and the legal systems together. Legal by design. Preventive law.

03 ⁄ 04

Novel legal issues in frontier AI

“…mapping the unsettled legal terrain created by capable AI systems, including questions of liability, agency, and institutional authority.”

Mapping the unsettled law of capable machines — and building in it.

My 25-year career has thrived where the law lacks settled answers — autonomous-vehicle liability and agency (a precursor to AI agents), digital first-sale and ownership, and the copyrightability of machine-made works.

Beyond merely analyzing this terrain, I'm a named inventor building in it. One of my patents (with Thomson Reuters) decomposes legal work into structured, trackable tasks across the entire matter lifecycle — the scaffolding an AI agent needs to actually perform legal work, task by task. Another of my patents (with Fastcase) turns litigation dockets into machine-readable signals that power data-driven analytics of likely case outcomes. As Anthropic’s agents act in the world, aligning them with the law — one major expression of human values — becomes unavoidable, and I’d love to help build “legal by design” systems with you.

I also work to keep the frontier open: with All the Music, my team brute-forced every melody that can exist — all 471 billion — and released them to the public domain (CC0) to defuse “you stole my melody” suits. With All The Patents, I'm applying the same “open the commons” idea to patents.

04 ⁄ 04

Applications that bolster democratic processes

“…developing or identifying ways AI could strengthen civic participation, legislative capacity, or judicial function.”

My entire career has bolstered democracy — by scaling justice (human values).

The through-line of everything above is access to justice. I build coalitions (SALI, FOLIO, rule of law) and serve legal-aid organizations worldwide. And I work directly with the highest courts — the Colorado Supreme Court, the Arizona Supreme Court and Maricopa County (the nation's third-busiest trial court), and Louisiana's appellate courts — helping them work through using AI to better deliver justice, plus consult on bar reform in Washington and Indiana.

In my current role at Clio I help build Vincent across a 110+-country, one-billion-legal-document dataset — and that same experience can help Anthropic's products and services further access to justice. Justice must be scaled — and I can help Anthropic scale it.