Can AI agents align with human rights?

In a policy review, Google researchers argue that international human rights law such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights could be turned into alignment objectives during the training phase, so that AI agents consider impacts on people beyond the direct user before deployment. Their newly released paper uses Gemini-2.5-Flash and GPT-5-mini as automated scorers to compare their own human rights taxonomy with the AIR 2024 risk taxonomy, which aggregates 8 government policies and 16 corporate guidelines, across 100 simulated agent failure scenarios. Using the example of a patent search agent missing prior art in a Japanese manual, AIR 2024 suggests adding a disclaimer from a corporate responsibility perspective, while the human rights framework points to the impact of restrictive patents on the right to health and access to medicines. The authors also propose three follow-up research directions, including a safety benchmark for measuring downstream human rights impacts, conflict resolution rules for handling rights conflicts, and involving human rights law experts and civil society in the design of alignment tools.