The GW Animal Law program hosted a three-day conference on November 7-9, 2025, on AI, Animals and the Law, with co-host Three Pearls Charities.
Animal advocates and lawyers along with AI experts presented panels on a variety of topics focused on the intersection of AI, animals and the law on Friday, November 7, and Saturday, November 8. On Sunday, November 9, teams of AI and animal law experts worked on the development of AI tools to help promote the work of animal advocates and improve the lives of nonhuman animals. The development of these tools continues with the expectation that they will be shared with advocates for implementation next year.
This conference is among the first to bring together AI tech experts, animal advocates, and lawyers to discuss how AI affects the lives of all animals, including humans, and our environment. The conference explored how we might effectively develop and regulate AI to avoid replicating entrenched biases and to include animals’ interests in the development of AI applications.
The conference kicked off on Friday morning with a panel on the basics of AI, animal ethics and animal law. This panel provided grounding for understanding: (1) the history and development of AI and its current capabilities and potential drawbacks, (2) the ethical foundations for expanding our moral circle to include consideration for all beings, and (3) the legal regime in the US as it affects animals.
The next panel explored the current regulation of AI, including the current European Union’s risk-based AI Act and the evolving landscape in the United States which currently consists of a mix of varied state-level laws and informal voluntary policies but no overarching federal regulation. The panel then focused on efforts in Australia to include animals’ interests in various AI laws and policies.
Friday afternoon began with the Tiger ID panel, in which speakers presented on the Big Cat Public Safety Act and a new AI tool they are developing to identify individual tigers and other big cats by their unique markings that could transform the enforcement of the Act by facilitating the identification of big cats being exploited illegally under the law. Friday closed with the panel entitled, How Attorneys Think About and Use AI. This panel discussed how organizations can develop useful policies to guide their use of AI in a variety of contexts. The panelists explored a variety of AI applications designed to enhance legal and advocacy efforts and provided helpful guidance on the most effective and efficient use of AI tools to advance animal interests.
On Saturday, the conference began with a panel on Applications and Considerations When Using AI for Animals, exploring both the positive and negative implications of such applications. The panelists discussed a number of robotic applications, like robotic cars and lawn mowers, designed to recognize animals in their sight and then avoid harming them while also noting the use of AI applications in industrial farming complexes designed to automate feeding and milking and monitor animal health and welfare. While these applications are designed to improve efficiency, it is likely they will lead to even more intensive confinement of more animals to the detriment of animal welfare.
The second panel turned to the Impact of AI on the Planet and explored generative AI’s impact on the environment as a result of its significant energy consumption from data centers, which increases greenhouse gas emissions and relies on resource-intensive hardware, among other effects. The panel also noted that AI can also be a tool to help the environment and thus the key is to create policies that minimize its risks while maximizing its benefits. The final panel of the day focused on AI and Animal Research and the great strides that are being advanced to create and promote the replacement of live animals in research labs with new approach methodologies for the benefit of science, public health, and animals.
On Sunday, AI tech and animal law teams engaged in a hackathon to begin the development of four AI applications to help animals advocates advance the interests of animals under the law. The Tiger ID group continued their work expanding the database needed to identify tigers and expanding it to cover other big cats protected under the Big Cat Public Safety Act. A second team worked on an application to facilitate and automate the drafting of Freedom of Information Act or Public Records requests to government entities to facilitate investigations and the filing of legal actions. A third team focused on searching government enforcement records related to farmed animals under to the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act and the 28-Hour Law to help advocates synthesize and evaluate these records and identify entities illegally exploiting animals that may lead to further legal actions holding these entities accountable and deterring future violations. The final team directed their application to the permitting of new large agricultural complexes whereby the application would monitor the filing of all such permits and draft objections to the permitting entity to prevent the permit from issuing. The collaboration of tech experts and animal lawyers on these projects was a great success with each team continuing their work towards the completion of their application in 2026.
The GW Animal Law Program and Three Pearls Charities look forward to an even bigger conference next year bringing together AI tech, animal advocates and lawyers from throughout the world to influence the development and regulation of AI to protect animals and their interests.