Chiara Gallese

Alexander K. Saeri, Jess Graham, Michael Noetel et al.

Artificial intelligence poses many risks, ranging from familiar present-day harms to unprecedented and potentially catastrophic ones. Effective risk management requires prioritization: we must understand which risks are most severe, who is most vulnerable, and who is most responsible for addressing them. We report results from a three-round Delphi study conducted late 2025 with 272 international AI experts. Experts rated 24 AI risks on harm probability and severity, sector and actor vulnerability, actor responsibility, and overall concern. Experts estimated the five most severe harms in the next 5 years were likely to come from dangerous capabilities, competitive dynamics, weapons & cyberattacks (including CBRNE), power centralization, and false information. In a business-as-usual scenario, experts judged 18 of 24 risks as having a more than 10% probability of catastrophic outcomes (e.g., more than 1 million deaths or more than USD 100B in financial loss) in the next 5 years (2025-2030). In a scenario where pragmatic mitigations are implemented, experts still judged five risks as having a more than 10% probability of catastrophic outcomes: dangerous capabilities, weapons & cyberattacks, environmental harm, inequality & unemployment, and power centralization. All 24 risks were judged as being more than 5% likely to cause catastrophic outcomes. AI users and the general public were judged the most vulnerable to these risks, but experts assigned the highest responsibility for addressing them to general-purpose AI developers and governance actors (including governments, regulators, and standards bodies). Across most risks, experts identified information, finance, and national security as the most vulnerable sectors. These findings can guide AI risk prioritization and clarify expert expectations about who should bear responsibility for mitigation.

Chiara Gallese

The debate about the concept of the so called right to explanation in AI is the subject of a wealth of literature. It has focused, in the legal scholarship, on art. 22 GDPR and, in the technical scholarship, on techniques that help explain the output of a certain model (XAI). The purpose of this work is to investigate if the new provisions introduced by the proposal for a Regulation laying down harmonised rules on artificial intelligence (AI Act), in combination with Convention 108 plus and GDPR, are enough to indicate the existence of a right to technical explainability in the EU legal framework and, if not, whether the EU should include it in its current legislation. This is a preliminary work submitted to the online event organised by the Information Society Law Center and it will be later developed into a full paper.