Bill Hughes 🦊 (@BillHughesDC)

I’m excited to share that I’ve joined @RoboStrategy Advisors to handle legal and policy. I’m taking this on because embodied AI and humanoid robotics are arriving faster than the law is ready for — and the legal and policy questions are remarkably wide-ranging: • National security and trade — export controls, CFIUS, and supply-chain rules increasingly govern who can build and deploy these systems. • Liability and insurance — how tort law assigns responsibility when an autonomous machine acts in the physical world. What consumer protections we need to introduce. • Safety and standards — the standards-setting work (NIST and beyond) that will shape both safety and global competitiveness. • Data and privacy — what it means to have capable machines operating in homes, workplaces, and other human environments. • Labor and workforce — the genuinely hard questions about how this technology interacts with work. • Federalism — a growing patchwork of state approaches and the open question of federal preemption. • And running through all of it, the US–China competition that frames so much of the current debate. Getting to work across that entire range is the kind of substantive legal work I’ve always wanted to do — but the work ahead is as much about engagement as analysis. I want to help bring the best minds in robotics to the table and make sure their insight actually reaches the people writing the rules: on Capitol Hill, in state capitals, across the federal agencies, and with policy counterparts around the world. My aim is to approach the opportunities and the concerns the same way — soberly and with clear eyes. Not hype, not alarm, but policymaking grounded in how these systems really work, and an honest accounting of what they can and can’t yet do, and how policy has to evolve to embrace this future. Thank you to @Rewkang @WarcMeinstein for the opportunity and the trust. I’m grateful to be joining such a strong team, I expect to learn an enormous amount from them, and I’m excited to help build something that can help define this emerging field. I’ll be writing more on these questions and others in the months ahead — I’d welcome comparing notes with others working at the intersection of technology, law, and policy. LFG