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Comment by ataha322 | Hacker News Reader

The question isn't just who's liable - it's whether traditional contract structures can even keep up with systems that learn and change behavior over time. Wonder if this becomes a bigger moat than the AI.

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You literally don’t want contracts that ‘learn and change behavior over time’?

What is the stated use case here?

No, at least not in all cases. Customers incur review costs and potentially new risks if you change contract terms unexpectedly. In my business many large customers will only adopt our ToS if we commit to it as a contract that does not change except by mutual agreement. This is pretty standard behavior.

I can’t think of any case where someone who cares about the contract (aka actual terms) would be okay with it just changing. Arguably, it violates the concept of a contract which in most legal systems requires a meeting of the minds.

Do you have any examples where it would be okay?

Only a fraction of our customers insist on locking the contract terms. It's far less than half, and it's not correlated in an obvious way to the value of the contract.

Probably a dumb question, but what do you mean with changing behavior over time? Contract with changing clauses? From my limited knowledge on the matter, the idea of a contract is getting rules that would not change without agreement from both parties.

I encounter this all the time with GenAI projects. The idea of stability and "frozen" just doesn't exist with hosted models IMO. You can't bet that the model you're using will have the exact behavior a year from now, hell maybe not even 3 months. The model providers seem to be constantly tweaking things behind the scenes, or sunsetting old models very rapidly. Its a constant struggle of re-evaluating the results and tweaking prompts to stay on the treadmill.

Good for consultants, maybe, horrible for businesses that want to mark things as "done" and move them to limited maintenance/care and feeding teams. You're going to be dedicating senior folks to the project indefinitely.

You're gonna have to own the model weights and there will be an entire series of providers dedicated to maintaining oldmodels.

This is a big motivation for running your own models locally. OpenAI's move to deprecate older models was an eye-opener to some but also typical behavior of the SaaS "we don't have any versions" style of deployment. [0] It will need to change for AI apps to go mainstream in many enterprises.

[0] https://simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/8/surprise-deprecation-of...

This isn't a new problem. It's like if you built a business based on providing an interface to a google product 10 years ago and google deleted the product. The answer is you don't sell permanent access to something you don't own. Period.

I interpreted the comment as worrying about drift across many contracts not one contract changing.

Imagine I create a new agreement with a customer once a week. I’m no lawyer so might not notice the impact of small wording changes on the meaning or interpretation of each sequential contract.

Can I try and prompt engineer this out? Yeah sure. Do I as a non lawyer know I have fixed it - not to a high level of confidence.

humans.

Also it might be that with systems that learn and change behavior over time, some sort of contract structure is needed. Not sure if traditional is the answer though.

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