Here’s What a Conservative Approach to AI Regulation Could Look Like

What does it mean to be a conservative? In many ways, it means understanding that the answers to new problems are often found not in tearing everything down and starting over, but in the traditions, institutions, and legal structures that have already stood the test of time. Yet that instinct has been strangely absent from the debate over artificial intelligence. 

As politicians, activists, and tech critics clamor for new regulatory agencies, sweeping laws, development moratoria, and elaborate bureaucratic systems to address AI’s risks, Judge Glock, the Manhattan Institute’s director of research and a senior fellow, offers conservatives a far more familiar answer: old-fashioned tort law. Rather than constructing an entirely new regulatory state around a technology we barely understand, Glock argues that existing legal principles can hold bad actors accountable when AI causes real harm.

Manhattan Institute's @judgeglock argues AI may not need a new regulator at all, just old-fashioned tort law that makes companies pay for the harms they cause:

"The proposal is to rely on the existing systems of tort in America. Tort law is basically the law that allows people… https://t.co/2dbj2ANqEr pic.twitter.com/jk2nPNYRAq

— MTS (@MTSlive) September 10, 2026

"Well, a lot of the proposal is actually just to rely on the existing systems of tort in America," Glock said. "So tort law, for those of you not familiar with it, is basically the law that allows people to sue companies or other individuals for harming them. If you get hit by a company's truck, you can bring a tort law claim against the trucker or the company to have them make you whole, as it's known in the law. Basically, make sure that they pay for your medical bills, any lost work or any damages they cause to you and your life."

"So tort law is one of the main ways we've regulated businesses throughout American history. We don't think about it as much because we obviously now have a massive regulatory state that designs to do this through bureaucracies and through former rules and rulemaking and federal litigation by the government. But one of the main ways we've regulated business and especially new technology is through this tort law," he said.

This approach would not require massive new legislation or another sprawling federal bureaucracy. It would simply give individuals and businesses a clear path to sue AI companies for real damages. That creates the right incentive: companies would have every reason to prevent foreseeable harm, while Americans would avoid preemptively regulating into the ground the same technologies that are likely to make their lives safer, healthier, and easier.

Glock then went on to explain how tort law, for example, might've applied to the infamous Hugging Face incident that occurred in July.

Manhattan Institute's @judgeglock explains how tort law would handle the Hugging Face incident, and why no actual damages means no tort case:

"We often have in our study criminal liability in addition to tort and other sorts of civil liability. In this case, the supposed… https://t.co/2dbj2ANqEr pic.twitter.com/oLVbRBgyr4

— MTS (@MTSlive) September 10, 2026

"I'm not saying that's the only way to deal with harms from AI companies, but ideally we want them to not think about trying to satisfy some federal regulator or some pseudo expert body that gets set up to decide what kind of model or proposal would or would not make sense, but make them pay for actual harms they do," Glock concluded. "If they bring down a power plant and knock out a lot of a city or something, they should have to pay for that. And tort law is a way, ideally, to internalize the harms that can potentially be caused from AI without having kind of a top down bureaucratic regulatory body administering it."

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