September 24, 2026 • Articles

AI Legal Issues for Hawaii Employers: Bringing LLMs to Life

Early artificial intelligence (AI) adopter industries included, not surprisingly, finance, manufacturing, defense, soon followed by tech/information, retail, healthcare. The advancement of LLMs, or Large Language Models that train on massive amounts of text to understand and generate human-like language, encouraged adoption in new fields, such as professional services, legal and compliance, and customer support, which benefited from LLM capability in content creation, communication and problem solving. For employers and business owners, LLM-based chatbots connect people to complex information stored online to provide:

• Internal navigation of HR processes or recordkeeping systems
• Public-facing tools for customer support, research, and education

There is an active Hawaii-grown community of startups developing AI tools and services for local as well as global customers. Some notes for prospective AI developers:

• Makers of AI companions (systems that simulate human relationships) should know that Hawaii has specific disclosure and control requirements to prevent harm to children and persons who express suicidal ideations.
• It remains to be seen whether Hawaii’s law banning post-employment noncompete and non-solicitation provisions for software and IT companies will apply to AI developers or whether LLMs fall outside the law’s definition of “software.”

For more on this subject, watch the Hawaii episode of the Employment Law Association Asia Pacific (ELA APAC) vlog series here.