Harvard Ethics Center

AI deregulation shifts risk to private sector, Harvard Ethics Center's Boundaries of Tolerance Framework finds

The Harvard Ethics Center published an analysis on November 1, 2025, examining the implications of America's AI Action Plan for businesses operating in an increasingly deregulated US AI environment. The analysis finds that the Action Plan shifts primary responsibility for AI risk management onto the private sector, reducing federal oversight in favor of innovation-led development. In response, the Harvard researchers introduce the Boundaries of Tolerance Framework, a structured approach designed to help organizations define and document the range of risks they consider acceptable in AI development and deployment. The framework is positioned as a corporate governance tool for filling the gap left by an immature regulatory landscape, urging companies to establish their own ethics and governance standards proactively. For enterprise compliance teams, this signals that internal risk tolerance documentation may increasingly serve as a de facto governance instrument in the absence of binding federal rules. Organizations subject to sector-specific oversight, such as financial services or healthcare, should assess how voluntary frameworks of this type interact with existing regulatory obligations.