OpenAI’s Nicole Diaz: AI is “the new frontier of product liability”

At Compliance Week’s The Leading Edge: AI & Data Analytics in E&C in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, held Jan. 28-29, 2026, one message came through clearly: companies are racing to deploy AI tools, but compliance programs are still struggling to keep up with the scale, speed, and uncertainty the technology introduces.

That tension framed a wide-ranging panel discussion featuring Nicole Diaz, associate general counsel for compliance at OpenAI, who explained how AI is forcing a rethink of what effective compliance looks like. Rather than treating AI as another tool to bolt onto existing controls, Diaz argued that the technology challenges some of the most basic assumptions behind traditional risk management.

“Claiming you’ve assessed and mitigated all systemic risks with a generative AI system is like claiming you’ve predicted every possible chess game,” Diaz said.