The play The plaintiff's bar flooded the courts with lawsuits against social media platforms.

Now they're coming for AI firms, too. Some of the complaints alleged that companies

design their services to addict teenagers.

Others accuse the tech firms of deploying algorithms or producing outputs in a manner that causes real-world harm.

In the words of technology expert Joe Biden, they're killing people.

These cases face formidable hurdles. They must overcome Section 230. They have to get around the First Amendment. And then there's the small matter that they're

built on junk science. But of course, plaintiffs lawyers don't let technicalities like the law or

the science get in the way of a handsome contingency fee. This is the tech policy podcast. I'm Corbyn

Barthold, internet Policy Council at Tech Freedom.

My guest today are my BFF, Ari Cohn, lead counsel for Tech Policy at Fire,

and a real lawyer, Thomas Curland, a partner at Patterson Belknap.

We're going to break down these lawsuits, and we're not even going to bill you for our time. Ari, Tom, welcome. Great to be here. Great to be here as always.

For like that 35,000th time. Ari is an old hand here, Tom, as he just made clear.

So, you know, let's start with you, our special guest.

We last covered this topic on an episode called When Schools, Scapegoats, Social Media.

And on that, we had Tort Law legend Walter Olson talk a lot about the

strange tort dynamics of mass torts or class actions. And I'm going to put that in the show notes.

But it really is a topic that bears repeating.

Could you tell us some of the ways that products liability litigation in this context tends to be a

contorted version of litigation?

Sure.

And I think to get there, the right place to start is, you know, what is products liability law in the United States and how did we get there?

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