The Impact of AI on Corporate Criminal Liability: Algorithmic Misconduct in the Prism of Derivative and Holistic Theories

While the issues related to artificial intelligence (AI) accountability are largely discussed by scholars, algorithmic corporate liability may represent a problem equally important and urgent to deal with, since the main risks come from the use of new technologies by corporations. This article precisely reviews the interplay between AI and the main systems of corporate criminal liability: the focus is on purely algorithmic corporate misconduct, rather than the cases where employees purposely, knowingly, or recklessly design AI systems to break the law. To this end, the most common regimes of corporate criminal liability will be considered: strict and vicarious liability; the principle of identification and, finally, the responsibility based on organizational fault or corporate culture. Some concluding remarks follow on the opportunity of an ad hoc regulation in order to incentivize corporations to accelerate their embrace of automation and, at the same time, to promote compliance.