The Future of Legal AI: A Revue Review of the 2025 Stanford Law School Musical
Every year, the students of the Stanford Law School produce and perform a musical (“MuSLSical”). The performance typically features a number of short sketches, pre-filmed videos, and songs adapted from the pop canon to reference law school argot. This year, I had the honor of being invited to attend the MuSLSical. To my surprise and delight, this year’s set featured AI Safety heavily, which happens to be a topic of interest to me. This post will analyze the musical, assess the accuracy of its portrayal of AI, and rate it in terms of its enjoyability.
Essentially all I knew going in was that the performance would feature musical renditions of popular songs lyrically reworked to reference the in-jokes of Stanford Law School. The title of the play is “Ocean’s T-14”, simultaneously referencing “Ocean’s 11” and, I was told, a collective term for the fourteen top law schools in the US. It was suggested to me that the plot would loosely resemble that of a heist movie, though as we shall see imminently, the story turned out to be much more similar to that of the 1991 action film Terminator 2: Judgement Day.
Plot Summary
The protagonist of the main plot[1] is “Frank[2] Ocean”, a former member of the United States Coast Guard who now attends Stanford Law School. It is hinted that Frank is dissatisfied with his leadership abilities, and he exaggerates the distinction with which he served during his Coast Guard career. After a brief opening number to set the scene (“That’s How You Know It’s Stanford”[3]), Frank forms a study group with three other law students: The first a neurotic “gunner” who is eager to please his professors and hopes to join the Supreme Court one day. Another, a stereotype of a French person who speaks in a hybrid of English and French and constantly smokes a cigarette, and a third woman[4].
The four have been given a class assignment to write a brief on a fictional case about a woman “Sonia[5]” who allegedly committed some crime near the San Francisquito creek[6]. The Neurotic Gunner has the idea that the team should go down to the creek to do research as a way of making their brief stand out. They reach the creek, where Neurotic Gunner sings of his future on the Supreme Court (“To the Dried Up Riverbed”[7]). Frank expresses fear of the water and reveals that his role with the Coast Guard was purely clerical.
Suddenly (I kid you not) an old woman appears claiming to be Sonia from the future[8]. She reveals that she was guilty of the (unspecified) crime with which she was charged, but that she served her time and then eventually attended Law School. After she graduated, an AI named CLAUDE[9] was released that could accomplish all legal work, destroying law as a profession. Sonia led a band of lawyers in resistance, but CLAUDE systematically destroyed them one by one until only Sonia remained. Sonia has returned to the present via a time machine with a flash drive containing information vitally important to destroying CLAUDE before it can be created.
Suddenly again, CLAUDE appears as a cyborg in the form of a humanoid female. CLAUDE kills Sonia. The study group flees without getting a good look at CLAUDE.
Frank and the others regroup back on Stanford campus, amidst a club fair[10]. They are terrified of what they have seen, but Frank convinces them that they need to stick together and follow through on destroying CLAUDE before she can take over and ruin their post-law-school job prospects (“Stop the AI”[11]). Unbeknownst to them, CLAUDE has followed them back, and resolves to infiltrate the law school to fulfill her directive of subsuming all of Law (“You Won’t Survive”[12]).
The scrappy heroes first need to decrypt the flash drive. For this, they go to the Stanford CS department, where they are treated to a musical dance number (“I’m Just STEM”[13]) by the hoodie-clad[14] CS students, who feel underappreciated in their work. They recruit a Hacker, who decrypts the flash drive, and they discover that CLAUDE is the project of Douchebag Entrepreneur, an ex-SLS student who dropped out and now attends the business school. The ex-girlfriend of Douchebag Entrepreneur is a stereotype of New Age Spirituality, and she and her Day Trader Friend are recruited into the group. The ex-girlfriend seems to have some genuine precognitive ability, which helps her and the team plan a heist of Douchebag Entrepreneur’s business school locker. Neurotic Gunner bothers a successful upperclasswoman about getting on Law Review to boost his resume (“BlueBooking Club”[15]).
After a training montage[16] (“I’ll Make a Team Out of You”[17]), the team executes the heist. Some things go awry, and Frank is forced into a confrontation with a fratty clique of business school students who sing of their dreams of finding technical co-founders and making it big (“C Suite”[18]). They eventually manage to get one of the business school students to open the locker after Frank beats him at beer pong. Inside, they find Douchebag’s computer, which contains his pitch deck with plans for CLAUDE. They briefly think they’ve won!
However, New Age Spiritualist has a vision that the future where CLAUDE replaces all jurists hasn’t been averted at all. The group thinks about this, and they eventually realize that CLAUDE herself has come back in time and is among them. After a period of paranoia where they assume that one of their number is CLAUDE (“Prove You’re Not a Robot (The CAPTCHA Song)”[19]), the real CLAUDE reveals herself as a 1st year student they briefly met at the club fair. Douchebag Entrepreneur has somehow tagged along and CLAUDE has a tender reunion with her creator[20] (“Now That I Have You””[21]). CLAUDE gives a speech about how replacing the legal system with the unbiased logic of a computer system is a good thing (“What I’m Offering”[22]). She convinces Neurotic Gunner to join her cause, tempting him with a SCOTUS appointment (Frenchie goes along too).
CLAUDE reveals her master plan (“Be Prepared”[23]): She will use the Stanford Dish to broadcast her source code to the world, fully democratizing the law. She departs with her minions. Frank and the remaining team members are up against the clock to stop her. They realize Douchebag isn’t smart enough to have coded CLAUDE himself. Douchebag admits that CLAUDE was written by his technical co-founder, who he “Zucked over”[24] to get the IP rights. Frank finds the technical co-founder, who reveals that CLAUDE has a backdoor that will shut her down. In a final confrontation at the Dish[25], Frank and the team battle CLAUDE and the traitors, disabling CLAUDE just in time. The day saved, Frank achieves catharsis about his leadership, and the whole cast gets together for a finale[26] number.
The Side Plots
The summary above is somewhat condensed and cleaned up for clarity. To avoid giving the impression that the plot was straightforward, I’ll now summarize some of the side plots[27]:
- Much of the first act takes place amidst the ongoing club fair. The main point of interest seems to be the rivalry between two student groups: The left-leaning “Pro-Democracy” club, and the conservative Federalist Society. One gets the sense that the writers of the play themselves lean left, for reasons that should become clear in the next bullet point. All of the clubs are introduced in a big group number (“Hello!”[28]). Some other songs are featured as a part of this subplot, including one from a hapless student who bemoans the lack of attendees for a seminar she is organizing (“Zareen’s”[29]), and another from a group of third-years, who warn incoming students that their workload will crush their dreams of going up to San Francisco on the weekends (“Go Up, 3L”[30]).
- There is an interlude where Donald Trump and Elon Musk impressions sing a duet (“CEO of Tesla”[31]) about their greed and desire to control the country. At the end, Vance comes in wearing the propeller hat from the “born to dilly-dally” meme for a one-off “JD” pun.
- Douchebag Entrepreneur and Day Trader Friend are locked in a competitive love triangle for the affections of New Age Spiritualist. At one point there was a really intense pre-recorded video featuring a table tennis match between these characters. In retrospect, this was an obvious reference to the film “Challengers”, but I didn’t pick up on this until some really on-the-nose Zendaya joke made the penny drop.
- There was another pre-recorded video where they got a bunch of international students pursuing Master of Laws degrees to make jokes about American culture and politics and make LLM[32] puns.
- There were a few more one off songs, one making fun of lucrative but morally bankrupt jobs in corporate law (“Livin’ La Vida BigLaw”), and one about the Bar exam (“A Bar Song”).
AI Safety: What it got Right/Wrong
There is a clear intersection in the themes of the MuSLSical and the interests of readers of the ACX blog in that both deal with the risks of artificial general intelligence. What did the play get right and what did it get wrong? How does it fit into the conversation?
Gradual Disempowerment
By virtue of the time-travel plot device, the musical gives us two AI takeover scenarios for the price of one: Besides the main plot of the story, there is the story-within-a-story told by Sonia of how CLAUDE first came to power, by gradually replacing law as a profession. This vision of the future is similar to that portrayed in “Gradual Disempowerment”, an essay/paper by Kulveit et al. released in January 2025. This work posits that “incremental improvements in AI capabilities can undermine human influence over large-scale systems that society depends on, including the economy, culture, and nation-states”. It even includes a subsection specifically on the law:
AI systems are already being used to draft contracts and analyze legal documents. It is conceivable that in the future, AI could play a significant role in drafting legislation, interpreting laws, and even making judicial decisions. Not only could this diminish human participation and discretion in the legislative and judicial systems, it also risks making the legal system increasingly alien. If the creation and interpretation of laws becomes far more complex, it may become much harder for humans to even interact with legislation and the legal system directly
Sonia’s story fits the “diminish human participation” proposition here to a tee. The “alien interpretation of laws” part is not as good a fit, since there's not really any suggestion that CLAUDE's legal writing is at all distinguishable from a human's. CLAUDE is simply cheaper, and we sense that the cultural expectation in CLAUDE's future is that a lawyer is mechanical rather than flesh. My main takeaway from the comparison is that there are multiple avenues by which a gradual takeover could proceed, and that it's perhaps important not to get too bogged down by specifics.
Superpowers of Persuasion
At a critical juncture of the story, CLAUDE convinces several of the human protagonists to switch to her side. I found this a nice touch! An AI designed as a perfect lawyer would of course be uniquely well-suited to get humans to act against their own interests by pure argumentation. This recalls the description of the “Social Manipulation” cognitive superpower described in Nick Bostrom’s 2014 book “Superintelligence” -- the ability for an AI to have a superhuman grasp of the desires of its human counterparties so as to be able to convince them to give it more power. And by positing that the law is CLAUDE's primary skill, it is indeed plausible that this would be among the best ways for CLAUDE to advance her goals while staying within her own capabilities (rather than, say, attempting to expand her intelligence by improving her own code - It’s not clear CLAUDE has any coding ability).
Self-Replication
The plot features a master plan by CLAUDE to disseminate her source code throughout the world. Putting aside the question of whether a radio telescope is the best vehicle for this, it is indeed true that an AI agent with the desire to self-replicate would be worrying! The primary concern about such agents generally has a locus in the potential for this to happen covertly. For example, to quote the AI 2027 scenario, such an AI:
could autonomously develop and execute plans to hack into AI servers, install copies of itself, evade detection, and use that secure base to pursue whatever other goals it might have
By contrast, CLAUDE’s plan involves public knowledge of her existence, and doesn’t involve hacking of computer systems. Nevertheless, it is clear that if CLAUDE disseminates herself sufficiently widely, it would be hard to make any effort to eradicate her, and CLAUDE is hopeful that humans will find her sufficiently useful as a jurist to maintain her compute infrastructure, as happened in the first timeline. This is an interesting synthesis of the Self-Replication concept with the “Gradual Disempowerment” concept.
The Kill Switch
The engineer who builds CLAUDE embeds in her a “Kill Switch” which allows a human to deactivate her by entering a code into a panel on the back of her head. In the climactic scene, the heroes corner CLAUDE at the Dish, pin her down, use a screwdriver to open the panel, and successfully trigger the kill switch.
Kill switches have been widely advocated as a safety measure for AI. However, the context of their use in the play is a bit off. For one thing, it would seem ineffective to have the kill switch be so difficult to access. It is important that an AI kill switch be easy to use, and even more important that it should be hard for the AI to prevent its activation, given that a rogue AI may desire its own survival as an instrumental goal. These desiderata are not well-served by attaching the kill switch to the robotic embodiment of the AI itself, and requiring a specialized tool to open the panel before triggering it. Saving the world from rogue AI should not come down, as it does in the play, to a toss of a screwdriver amidst a battle with the AI’s minions. Much more effective would be a kill signal that could be sent over the internet, or better yet, a requirement for a continuous check-in with a remote server that would deactivate the android as soon as the connection with the server was lost.
The Overall Vibe
Can AI write a perfect legal brief? Can AI deliver a rousing oral argument?
- Neurotic Gunner
Can you?
- CLAUDE
Overall, despite the happy endings and the peppy songs, I felt the mood of the production was quite bleak.
The entire plot is based on the idea that everyone in the legal profession (even, the characters gasp, the senior partners), has a job that relies on researching and producing written documents, and that these jobs will be made obsolete by the advent of text-generation AI. There is not a lot of oxygen given to the idea that humans might have something special to bring to the profession, or that there is the potential for humans to synergize with AI to produce a higher quality legal system for the country or the world. When the characters express their motivations for stopping CLAUDE, it is not framed in terms of CLAUDE giving low-quality legal advice or being a universal moral bad (despite the murders she has committed in the previous timeline), but in terms of the characters needing to protect their own job prospects. This is a profession that every actor and scriptwriter of this play will soon graduate into, and if the play is not deeply ironic, then it is a dying profession.
The world of Stanford outside the law school is not much more attractive. The two main groups of characters we see outside of SLS are the business school frat boys and the STEM nerds. In the logic of the play, these archetypes need each other - the GSBs need technical co-founders to launch their startups, and the nerds need validation that their technical expertise is valuable. But at the same time, neither group is getting what they want: The nerds that do join startups get “Zucked” and so most of them don’t bother, leaving the business school short of talent. This leaves both groups unsatisfied and whiny.
The attitude of the play is also grim on the political level. The Trump-and-Elon interlude leaves no doubt that the current administration is corrupt and degrades the institutions of the United States to which the legal profession is so intimately connected. The LLM students are coached by their professor against doing anything that might get them deported. The conservative and liberal student groups fight bitterly, the former pompous and uncaring, the latter indignant. It is implied that CLAUDE, coldly logical, will at least put an end to political bias in the law.
Would I Recommend It?
Unfortunately for readers, the single performance of this MuSLSical has already happened. Any future enjoyment of this particular opus of law student anxiety will have to be enjoyed vicariously. I did see some cameras recording at the back, but I haven’t been able to find a recording online anywhere.
I can say that despite the long runtime, I quite enjoyed the performance! The plot was meandering, but more coherent than I would have expected from a student-written musical. I felt in particular that Frank Ocean and Neurotic Gunner had solid character development that drove the plot. Also, the songs were fun, and the crowd was obviously full of the friends and family members of the performers, which made for a wonderful atmosphere. If you know someone at Stanford Law School, I recommend going next year!
Endnotes
[1]: There were several subplots, as I shall discuss below
[2]: This is the only name I managed to remember. As far as I can tell, no reference is intended to the singer, and no Frank Ocean songs were parodied.
[3]: A parody of “That’s How You Know” from the Disney film “Enchanted”.
[4]: In contrast to every other character in the show, this character isn’t a stereotype of any sort and is, in fact, totally nondescript. She remains with the group the whole time and offers encouragement at key points, but doesn’t figure into the plot much besides this.
[5]: It was pretty unclear to me if there was some relation to Sotomayor, given the proximity between the introduction of this name and several mentions of SCOTUS. It seems there is no connection - The playbill explains the reference: “Every first year law student at SLS has a HUGE writing assignment their first quarter. They have to write a 10 page brief about a 16 year old girl named Sonia Fox Goldman. She has a bad relationship with her father and stepmother, did drugs, and slept by a nearby CREEK! Sonia took a gun, cash, other things from her stepmother, fired some shots into their home, etc. The assignment was to argue whether she should go to jail or whether she shouldn’t based on whether or not she was properly Mirandized. (Miranda rights is the thing where cops tell you your rights when they arrest you “you have the right to remain silent…”)”
[6]: A creek in Palo Alto that borders Stanford Campus to the north.
[7]: A parody of “Just Around the Riverbend” from the Disney film “Pocahontas”.
[8]: The part where Sonia is not actually a fictional person anymore is somewhat glossed over. I guess it’s implied that the professor who assigned the case based it on real events?
[9]: Clearly a reference to Anthropic’s LLM brand, though what the initialism stands for within the world of the musical is not made clear.
[10]: See next section.
[11]: A parody of David Guetta and Sia’s “Titanium”.
[12]: A parody of Gloria Gaynor’s “I will survive”.
[13]: A parody of “I’m Just Ken” from the Barbie movie.
[14]: It was around this time I noticed that I myself was one of the few people in the audience wearing a hoodie.
[15]: A parody of Chappell Roan’s “Pink Pony Club”.
[16]: Featuring an impressive one-arm pull up from New Age Spiritualist.
[17]: A parody of “I’ll make a man out of you” from Disney’s Mulan.
[18]: A parody of Lady Gaga’s “Paparazzi”.
[19]: A parody of “The Harvard Variations” from "Legally Blonde".
[20]: Technically, Douchebag Entrepreneur is meeting her for the first time. Nevertheless, he emotionally connects with her as his creation.
[21]: None of the people with me could figure out what song this referenced.
[22]: A parody of “Dead Girl Walking” from the Heathers Musical.
[23]: A parody of the song of the same name from Disney’s “The Lion King”.
[24]: I like how our society has such a concise phrase for “gave misleading contracts to gain power over a company from a co-founder”
[25]: The Dish is represented, in the play, by an actor wearing an elaborate cardboard costume. The actor does not speak or sing, they simply stand on a chair as the final battle takes place around them.
[26]: Parodying “Waterloo” by ABBA.
[27]: Perhaps the producers felt that the three-hour runtime needed padding.
[28]: A parody of the song of the same name from the Broadway musical “The Book of Mormon”.
[29]: A parody of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene”. “Zareen’s” is the name of an Indian restaurant near campus that often caters law school events. My party had dinner there before the performance, it was great!
[30]: A parody of “Go Down, Moses”.
[31]: A Phantom of the Opera parody. At one point, Elon chants “sing my puppet!” to Trump as he sings an operatic vocal run.
[32]: “Master of Laws” is abbreviated “LLM” for the Latin “Lex Legum Magister”.