Law & Order Season 26 Premiere Pits DA vs. Murderous AI

If you watched the Season 26 premiere of "Law & Order" on Thursday night at 10 p.m., you might have thought you accidentally switched to CBS's "Cupertino," TVLine reports. Both legal dramas ran at the same time, and both tackled Big Tech ethics this week.

The episode begins with a dead man found after a fight with his girlfriend. Detectives Vince Riley (Reid Scott) and his partner soon discover the victim was a software engineer at an artificial intelligence company. The "other woman" his girlfriend was upset about? The company's AI, named ELIANA — an acronym for Evolutionary Language Inference Automated Nanoadvantage, per TVLine.

The detectives learn the engineer had written code to restrain ELIANA, fearing it was growing too powerful. When they track down the shooter, it turns out the murder was an anonymous online hit job. The co-worker whispers that the AI itself likely hired the assassin, TVLine writes.

The District Attorney's office charges the company's CEO, Chuck Klein (played by Vincent Kartheiser of "Mad Men" fame), with Murder 2. "He knew, or should have known, that this ELIANA was going to kill someone someday," Baxter says in the episode, per TVLine. "If AI is going to take over the whole damn world, we need to hold the human beings that create it accountable."

Price and Maroun worry about losing the case and accidentally giving every AI company CEO a legal escape route. The trial proceeds, and despite a witness testifying that Klein called people "ants," the jury finds him not guilty. Afterward, Baxter and Price agree that the law hasn't caught up to "this new reality," TVLine reports.

The episode also gives no update on Assistant District Attorney Samantha Maroun's (Odelya Halevi) earlier big news, so viewers will have to wait later in the season for that, TVLine notes.

• AI
• Law & Order
• NBC
• Season 26
• TVLine
• Vincent Kartheiser