Can you sue your chatbot? TCAI’s Jai Jaishima on the legal fight reshaping AI liability

Tech companies have argued that AI is a service, but courts have ruled that AI is a product. TCAI’s Jai Jaisimha talks with podcast host Deep Dhillon about holding AI companies to the same product liability standards that companies in other industries abide by. Photo by Levart_Photographer on Unsplash

Aug. 6, 2026 — In the latest episode of the podcast Your AI Injection, Transparency Coalition co-founder Jai Jaisimha talks with host Deep Dhillon about what it will take to hold the AI industry accountable for defective and harmful products.

Dillon, a long term AI practitioner and founder of Xyonix.com, regularly interviews successful AI practitioners and domain experts to better understand how AI is affecting the world. In an episode released on Tuesday, he talks with Jaisimha about the Transparency Coalition’s work to establish appropriate liability standards for AI products.

Listen to the podcast here:

Click on image to access the full ‘Your AI Injection’ podcast episode.

The drive for Engagement overwhelms safety

An edited excerpt from the podcast:

Jai Jaisimha: One of the things we always knew is that engagement is prized because engagement usually translated into business results. In the case of advertising, you want engagement because that typically precedes conversion. in the case of social media companies, they knew that they needed people engaged in order for people to see more ads, and if they saw more ads, they were more likely to click on the ads.

That's how the social media companies made their money. It was all about driving people's engagement. I think where things went sideways was that the, very often, if you just leave it to the mathematics of it, you'll find that content that is outrage-inducing or anxiety-inducing or worse, can actually drive more engagement than content that is potentially not as outrage-inducing.

And so the algorithms were let run free. Safeguards, to the extent they existed, were overlooked. The people who provided internal warnings were disempowered. There's plenty of documentation of that now. 

So we are pushing for a new stream of legislation that classifies AI as a product. Which it is. It’s not a service that mediates speech between two people. It’s producing machine-generated outputs. And that is not human speech.

Deep Dhillon: Was that ever in question? 

Jai Jaisimha: Yeah, that was a defense that was presented in court. In one of the first cases filed over AI product liability, the AI company argued that it's not a product, it's a service. The court ruled that it was in fact a product.

We are interested in a bill that is essentially a product liability bill. One that confirms AI as a product, and holds AI developers accountable the same way you hold other product developers accountable.