Or, AI is Embarrassing to All Involved
On Bastille Day, Fortune published an essay announcing that the State of Delaware is “proposing a new entity form,” the “artificial intelligence company” or “AIC,” and will be implementing it in a “regulatory sandbox” through a public-private partnership with Norm Ai.
There’s lots to say about this piece, co-authored by Delaware’s Secretary of State and the founder & CEO of Norm Ai.[1]
There’s the amazing coincidence that Norm Ai’s business model – selling software that both does corporate law provides regulatory oversight over compliance with corporate law – just happens to require a state partner to radically alter its legal regime to function.
There’s the calendar kismet, in that the the company’s announcement of its partnership with Delaware came just one week after the firm closed its latest round of VC investment (they’re up to C-series and $1.2 billion, now – time’s a-wastin’ for that ROI! ).
One might also note that the company’s marketing – and the CEO’s other publications – hinges on a fervent invocation of a coming technological rapture (the appearance of “artificial general intelligence” or AGI), a concept – and an urgency – widespread among the oligarchs enthralled by radical TESCREAL ideology.
(Personally, I’m most struck by a tiny detail – one that surely must actually be a random coincidence – that the law firm representing Norm Ai firm in its investment negotiations, Fenwick LLP, shares a name withthe Delaware town most recently in the news for convincing a judge to allow corporations to vote there. That’s wild!)
But as much as there is to say about the emerging “partnership” between one Secretary of State and an AI startup that seeks to replace both private lawyers and public regulators with statistical software, I want to focus on one small matter: the fact that Norm Ai cannot identify Delaware.
Let me step back: the Fortune article ran as an opinion piece, ostensibly, but really it’s a press release – one that Norm Ai posted, the same day as the magazine published, on the company’s press release blog. (See also: This Wayback Machine backup copy)
That press release features a header image of a Georgian-style brick building, with the seal of the state of Delaware superimposed on top, along with the press release title: “Norm Ai and Delaware propose the AIC.”
I want you to look at this image, closely. It’s a cropped shot of the building’s top floor, roof and steeple – taken from an angle that displays two of the clock faces on the white steeple, and then, below those, a set of chimneys that are also faced with a large clock, this one blue and red. There are some tree tops, and part of another structure’s roof line, visible on the right edge.
From the content of the release – and the article it reproduces – it’d be reasonable to guess that the building pictured here is some kind of classic Delaware structure, right? Perhaps Legislative Hall, or a prominent court house?
That’s what Google Gemini thinks it is:
Alas, AI is incompetent to this question. When it sits in Dover, the Court of Chancery meets in the Kent County Courthouse, a modern building finished in 2011. The Old Kent County Courthouse is an older building, around the corner, but while it’s built of brick and has a clock tower, it’s very much not the one Norm Ai chose to illustrate “Delaware law.”
Instead, the image is a photograph that some person (or thing) at Norm Ai chose is of INDEPENDENCE HALL which you probably know is in PHILADELPHIA, a city in the COMMONWEALTH OF PENNSYLVANIA – and not Delaware. (Some important things occurred at Independence Hall, including a little Declaration some 250 years ago, perhaps you saw some of the celebrations recently…)
An image header for a press release is a small thing, of course. But details matter, especially when the project partners claim they are developing “the most consequential” iteration of a “corporate legal structure” in history.
So my question to Delaware’s Secretary of State, and the other officials endorsing Norm Ai’s plan for our laws, is this: why do you trust an AI-managed corporation to rewrite Delaware’s laws, when that same AI-managed corporation can’t identify a single Delaware building?
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[1] “Norm Ai” is formally registered in the State of Delaware as a corporation under the name “NOMOS AI, INC.”, file no. 7070042, registered agent LEGALINC CORPORATE SERVICES INC., and has branches in New Jersey, New York, and California. The law firm subsidiary of Norm Ai, Norm Law, LLP, is registered in New York state.
Dael A. Norwood 