ALI Ethical Consent Framework™
Founded by Alison Leigh, PhD, MFT
Clinical Psychologist
hdai.org
Research
The Academic Foundation
Behind ALI.
The ALI Ethical Consent Framework is not a theory — it is a clinically grounded, research-supported architecture developed by Alison Leigh, PhD, MFT over decades of practice and formalized into a deployable standard.
Thirty years of clinical practice, formalized.
The research underlying ALI draws from established clinical psychology literature, informed consent doctrine, relational ethics, and the emerging field of AI safety — synthesized through the lens of thirty years of direct therapeutic practice by Alison Leigh, PhD, MFT. This is what distinguishes HDAI's work from academic AI ethics: the framework did not begin in a lab or a think tank. It began in a clinical room, with a human being, under a duty of care.
The formal research output includes a white paper, a conceptual paper, and published work available through SSRN. The full framework methodology is protected and available to qualified organizations under NDA.
This white paper establishes the case for ethical consent architecture in AI systems operating in sensitive human contexts. It defines the gap between existing AI safety frameworks and the clinical standards governing human-to-human care, and presents the foundational argument for why a deployable consent layer is both necessary and achievable.
Authored by Alison Leigh, PhD, MFT. The white paper draws on informed consent doctrine, clinical psychology ethics codes, and documented AI harm incidents to build a rigorous, evidence-based argument for the ALI approach.
The conceptual paper maps the structural design of the ALI framework — how clinical ethics principles translate into deployable AI architecture, what each layer of the framework addresses, and how it integrates with existing AI safety infrastructure. Specific methodology is available under NDA to qualified organizations.
This paper establishes ALI as a named category of AI safety infrastructure — distinct from bias mitigation, privacy compliance, or content moderation — and defines the scope of the ethical consent layer for the first time in the literature.
The disciplines that built ALI.
The ALI framework draws from three converging bodies of knowledge, each with deep roots in established academic and professional literature.
The ethics codes governing clinical psychology — informed consent, duty of care, confidentiality, relational boundaries, the principle of do no harm — form the primary architecture of ALI. These are not aspirational values. They are enforceable professional standards with decades of case law and clinical evidence behind them.
Informed consent is a legal and ethical doctrine developed through medical and psychological practice. It establishes that a person must understand what they are entering into before they can meaningfully agree to it. ALI applies this doctrine to AI interaction — where users routinely enter sensitive exchanges with no understanding of what the system is, what it cannot do, or how it may affect them.
The emerging field of AI safety has produced important work on bias, fairness, transparency, and alignment. ALI is complementary to this work — addressing the specific domain of human psychological safety and consent that existing AI safety frameworks have not yet systematically covered.
The research is complete.
Access depends on your purpose.
HDAI maintains a tiered access model for its research — protecting the proprietary framework architecture while making the foundational argument publicly accessible to qualified audiences.
Available to media, policy organizations, academic researchers, and qualified enterprise organizations upon request. Submit a contact inquiry to receive a copy.
Available under NDA to enterprise organizations, government agencies, and AI developers engaged in a formal evaluation of the ALI framework for deployment.
Published academic work by Alison Leigh, PhD, MFT is available through the Social Science Research Network. Contact HDAI for direct links to current publications.
The complete ALI framework architecture is available exclusively under NDA to organizations engaged in a formal pilot or licensing discussion with HDAI.
Ready to review
the research?
Contact HDAI to request the white paper, discuss NDA access to the conceptual paper, or arrange a briefing with Alison Leigh, PhD, MFT on the academic foundation of the ALI framework.