After launching a consultation in April, this ruling is binding and considered EU law, and Google has almost precisely one year to implement the changes.
The changes are broad and reach across Android, from demanding that other assistants should be voice-activated like «Hey, Gemini» to giving other AIs broad system access to software, hardware and sensors on the phone.
Continue reading “If Gemini can do it, other Android assistants should, too, the EU rules”
At the heart of it lies OpenAI’s chief hardware officer Tang Tan, who left his role as VP of Product Design at Apple in 2024 to work with Jony Ive, later joining OpenAI in the Io acquisition, and Chang Liu, who spent eight years at Apple as a Senior System Electrical Engineer before leaving for OpenAI in January.
The pair is accused of accessing confidential Apple systems and downloading «detailed information about unreleased products, engineering presentations, technical specifications, and proprietary project data,» The Verge reports.
The two have also been holding some interesting job interviews, Apple claims, where hires from Apple have been encouraged to lay out systems planning and to log into confidential systems and share trade secrets and restricted paperwork.
There are 400 ex-Apple employees at OpenAI, and the whole hardware business is «rotten to its core by its illegal reliance on misappropriated trade secrets,» the lawsuit alleges.
«We have no interest in other companies’ trade secrets,» OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri tells The Guardian.
Read more: The actual filing. More on 9to5Mac, The Verge, The Guardian, TechCrunch and Daring Fireball. Discussion on r/Singularity and Hacker News.
They had both offered the ability to create custom agents and chatbots that would establish emotional bonds with users, and act as humanlike companions.
As of July 15, this becomes illegal in China, after the awkwardly specifically named «Interim Measures for the Administration of Artificial Intelligence Anthropomorphic Interaction Services» goes into effect.
This is the first regulation of its kind, and bans bots that «simulate human personality traits, thinking patterns and communication styles to provide sustained emotional interaction,» The South China Morning Post writes.
The personalized service of the two chatbots were used by millions, many of them kids, and often replaced real-life human interaction, as one in seven young adults in China used them to form romantic relationships, Decrypt.io writes.
UNICEF has hailed the new law, calling it a «pioneering policy [that] marks a significant global step towards regulating AI powered emotional interaction services.»
Read more: The South China Morning Post, Decrypt.io, Wikipedia, and UNICEF.
The issue was two German publishers who were accused of fraudulent practices by AI Overviews that were not supported by the underlying links, and therefore counted as Google’s «own statements,» the court found.
The publishers sent a cease and desist letter to the search engine that got ignored, resulting in the lawsuit asking for Google to remove the statements, which was upheld.
The previous interpretation was that search engines merely quoted their sources before sending the user on, and full liability for this would ruin Google’s functionality.
AI Overviews, however, generate «independent, new, and substantive statements,» the court said, which are not necessarily supported by the underlying data — and are not needed for the search engine to function.
According to the NY Times, Google’s Gemini 3 model is inaccurate around 9% of the time and includes wrong links 56% of the time, resulting in millions of wrong answers every day, Ars Technica writes.
Read more: The Decoder, Ars Technica, and Engadget.
Donald Trump declared that «I don’t like certain aspects of it,» and said that the USA is «leading China, we’re leading on everybody» and that he doesn’t want to get in the way of that.
The draft order was designed to appease «doomers» within the Trump coalition who were worried about the advanced capabilities of some models that might pose serious cybersecurity risks.
One of the provisions was to have AI labs «voluntarily» submit their models to the government for review 90 days in advance, and also give access to «critical infrastructure providers,» Reuters reported.
DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis reckoned in January that China is «just months» behind the US in capabilities, and many advocates said the provision could hurt this competitiveness.
The order is now indefinitely postponed, but The White House has other AI security initiatives in the works, Axios reports.
Read more: Axios, Reuters, Washington Post (paywalled), and The NYT (paywalled).
The trial had been brought in 2024 over a 2019 decision by OpenAI to create a for-profit arm, which was later expanded into a public benefit corporation — allowing OpenAI to raise massive funds and possibly go public at a later stage.
Elon Musk was a co-founder of OpenAI in 2015, but left the board in 2018. He argued in court that it was set up as a charity, and his lawyers claimed that OpenAI’s executives had enriched themselves at the cost of the charity’s mission.
As the court decided on a technical issue, the jury never touched the actual merits of the case, Musk argues, and vows to appeal.
—It’s sort of like giving an engineer a legal degree, Mark Pike, Anthropic’s associate general counsel, tells Business Insider.
Claude now connects to iManage, NetDocuments, Docusign, Ironclad, and Thomson Reuters, while Cowork has plugins for commonly used legal databases like CourtListener, Definely, Thomson Reuters’ Westlaw, Courtroom5, and Box.
The push lets Claude «review contracts, surface case law» and draft legal documents, complete with source references, Anthropic says.
It also has prebuilt skills to do legal work on specialized topics like employment, privacy and product law, Business Insider writes.
— Claude is making a deeper push into knowledge work, with the legal sector emerging as one of its most significant and fastest-growing industries, an Anthropic spokesman told TechCrunch.
Read more: Claude legal, Business Insider, TechCrunch, and Reuters.
Under the Digital Markets Act, Google isn’t just another vendor — it’s one of seven dominant platforms, deemed «gatekeepers» to other services. That means it has to behave like a platform, like Windows, and offer equal access to its services.
The European Commission lists letting competing AI assistants have easy access to functions like sending emails, sharing and editing photos — and have system level access to control apps. It should also provide Android API access and support for free, they say.
Continue reading “The European Union starts process to open up Android to AI competitors”
The problem that copyright doesn’t fix is not the actual copying of Swift’s work, but deepfakes that copy her voice and likeness in generated content:
— Historically, singers relied on copyright law to protect their recorded music, writes trademark lawyer Josh Gerben. — But AI technologies now allow users to generate entirely new content that mimics an artist’s voice without copying an existing recording, creating a gap that trademarks may help fill.
Trademarking an artist’s voice and image has only been done once before, by Matthew McConaughey, in an effort to ensure that any «use of his likeness would require approval» in an AI world, Gerben writes.
It’s a novel approach that has yet to be tested by courts, but should provide protection for similar copies of Swift’s works — even those that are «confusingly similar.»
Read more: Josh Gerben’s blog post, Variety, and Reuters.
This erodes their copyright, they claim, and «starves publishers of revenue,» because people get their answers directly in ChatGPT rather than getting referred to their websites, TechCrunch writes.
Britannica is also claiming that ChatGPT erodes its trademarks by producing hallucinations and attributing them to their products.
There have been a lot of copyright lawsuits since the early days of LLM chatbots, but only a few have been settled. One judgment is from the Anthropic case, where a judge found that training on copyrighted works was «no different than training schoolchildren to write well».
Other judges have been more skeptical.
Read more: Reuters, TechCrunch, Engadget.
The platform has 3 billion users, and is considered a «gatekeeper» in EU laws, subject to demands for equal access.
The compromise Meta is rolling out is that rival chatbots will be allowed on the platform, but have to pay their way.
The fees range from €0.0490 to €0.1323 for «non-template messages.» That could ratchet up quickly, considering that chatbot sessions cover multiple messages across millions of users, writes TechCrunch.
The European Commission is said to be «analyzing» how this move «might affect its interim measures» as well as the broader investigation, Reuters reports.
Read more: Reuters and TechCrunch.
The Anthropic CEO says they will «work to enable a smooth transition,» after denying the US military use of their AI for mass surveillance or autonomous killing.
— In a narrow set of cases, we believe AI can undermine, rather than defend, democratic values, writes Amodei, — Some uses are also simply outside the bounds of what today’s technology can safely and reliably do.
Continue reading “Amodei officially says Anthropic won’t drop Pentagon safeguards”
Meta banned all AI chatbots other than Meta AI from WhatsApp on January 15th, and while the EU can take a long time to investigate antitrust allegations — they are considering issuing an early order to «avoid Meta’s new policy irreparably harming competition in Europe,» says Teresa Ribera, The EU’s Executive Vice-President for Clean, Just and Competitive Transition.
WhatsApp has over 3 billion users worldwide and qualifies as a gatekeeper in EU parlance, subject to rules on equal access.
Meta says that «There are many AI options and people can use them from app stores, operating systems, devices, websites, and industry partnerships,» in a statement to Reuters.
The process following this formal notification is that parties can examine the EU’s files, reply in writing and then receive a hearing. After that, the Commission will consider «interim measures,» such as restoring access for competitors, even as the case moves forward in their systems.
Read more: Statement by the EC, writeup on Reuters.
It’s an investigation («proceeding») started under the Digital Markets Act (DMA), made to ensure major platform owners don’t abuse their power, and Google now has six months to find a workable solution.
Gemini enjoys system-level and app-level access on Android, and many competitors have flagged this as a violation of the DMA.
— We are concerned that further rules which are often driven by competitor grievances rather than the interest of consumers, will compromise user privacy, security, and innovation, says Clare Kelly, Google’s Senior Competition Counsel to Reuters.
If no relief is found on the issue, the DMA allows for fines of up to 10% of a company’s global revenue.
Read more: The Commission’s statement, Engadget, Reuters.
The court documents contain no actual monetary payouts to the victim’s families, as this seems still to be negotiated.
These are not the only cases of this kind, and may signal a shift in strategy for the entire AI business, as Meta and OpenAI are also facing similar lawsuits.
Character.ai was accused by parents of encouraging their children to cut their arms, suggesting murdering their parents, writing sexually explicit messages and of not discouraging suicide, Axios writes.
They have since banned under 18s from using their service.
Read more: Writeups on Axios, TechCrunch.