Tag: law

«Anti-doomers» breathe easy after Trump cancels AI executive order

Not singing anything today. Executives and insiders were worried about their competitive edge. This image is from April 30. (Picture: Whitehouse.gov)
The White House was all lined up for a long-rumored executive order on AI, but it was abruptly canceled at a late stage.

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).

Musk’s OpenAI trial gets tossed by jury

OpenAI is off the hook for their for-profit organization. (Picture: Adobe)
The jury spent less than two hours Monday to deliberate on the case, and dismissed Musk’s claims for being filed after the statutory limitation of three years.

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.

Read more: NBC News, CNBC, Reuters, and The Verge.

Anthropic adds plethora of legal plugins, datasets to Claude, Cowork

Large Legal Model; Anthropic makes a push for legal shops and students. (Picture: shutterstock)
While law firms lead the line in AI adoption, Anthropic’s services just got a whole lot better at practicing law, with connections to a whole host of legal databases.

—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.

The European Union starts process to open up Android to AI competitors

Gemini is basically enjoying a monopoly for integrated system access on Android. The EU wants to change that. (Picture: generated)
Google has been aggressively implementing AI and Gemini on its platforms, such as web search — and Android. Right now, Gemini is basically the only AI with system access on the platform, and the EU sees room for improvement.

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”

Taylor Swift moves to trademark audio clips and image to protect from AI

The likeness of this image could be trademarked and used to sue AI platforms. (Picture: U.S. Patent & Trademark Office)
The trademark filings of two audio snippets and an image of her on stage with a guitar are intended to ward off AI deepfakes.

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.

Encyclopedia Britannica sues OpenAI over copyright and trademarks

The jury is still out on copyright protections for training materials in AI chatbots. (Picture: Britannica)
The revered encyclopedia along with Merriam-Webster’s dictionaries has sued the ChatGPT maker for training on their data and producing «verbatim reproductions» of their content, Reuters reports.

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.

WhatsApp tentatively allows AI chatbots competing with Meta in Europe

WhatsApp sets steep prices for rival AI access. (Picture: generated)
As the EU Commission is considering «interim measures» against the messaging app for refusing chatbots not made by Meta, WhatsApp is slightly opening the door to rivals in Europe.

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.

Amodei officially says Anthropic won’t drop Pentagon safeguards

Dario Amodei at TechCrunch Disrupt, 2023. (Picture: TechCrunch (CC BY 2.0))
Following last Friday’s meeting and ultimatum from the Pentagon, which set a deadline to respond by this Friday, Amodei says Anthropic will not comply with the demands.

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”

EU investigating WhatsApp AI ban, considering «interim actions»

The EU might decide that WhatsApp has to open for competing AI bots sooner rather than later. (Picture: European Commission)
The European Commission said yesterday that it had notified Meta on possible action to open up WhatsApp to rival AI chatbots.

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.

The EU wants equal access for other AI models on Google’s Android

The EU wants other AI labs to have the same hooks in Android that Gemini has. (Picture: generated)
— The aim is to ensure that third-party providers have an equal opportunity to innovate and compete in the rapidly evolving AI landscape on smart mobile devices, their statement says, per Engadget.

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.

Character.ai and Google settle harmful behavior court cases

With other AI companies watching closely, Google and Character.ai quietly bow out of contentious cases. (Picture: Adobe)
The companies have moved in four states to settle cases where the chatbot was accused of encouraging harmful behavior — sometimes resulting in death.

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.

New Chinese AI rules should spread «core socialist values,» identify as AI

China's new rules require AIs to identify as such, and to spread "core socialist values."
It is almost like China has learned from AI adoption in the west. (Picture: generated)
Newly published AI rules in China address both AI psychosis, and forbids spreading of rumors or endangering national security.

They also require that any AI that engages with people should announce at the start that they are talking to an AI, with new warnings every two hours, writes Gizmodo.

Also forbidden are «illegal religious activities,» obscenity, violence or crime, and the list goes on to cover libel and insults, material that damages relationships — or encouraging self harm and suicide.

There aren’t just warnings for using AI chatbots too long, but providers should also assess the user’s emotional state — and take «necessary measures to intervene,» writes Reuters.

Read more: Writeups on Reuters, Gizmodo.

NYT sues Perplexity for copying content, after cease and desist order

Copyrights might well trump AIs retrieval practices, bets the NYT.
The Times says Perplexity is copying their journalism and delivering it without permission. (Picture: Adobe)
The New York Times sent a cease and desist order to Perplexity in 2024, but the company has persisted with copying NYT content in their responses, the lawsuit alleges.

Perplexity still generates outputs that are «identical or substantially similar to» content from the Times, writes CNBC, and sometimes even hallucinates responses that get attributed to them, writes Reuters.

— While we believe in the ethical and responsible use and development of AI, we firmly object to Perplexity’s unlicensed use of our content, says NYT spokesperson Graham James.

Perplexity seems unfazed by the lawsuit, saying in a statement that:

— Publishers have been suing new tech companies for a hundred years, starting with radio, TV, the internet, social media and now AI. Fortunately it’s never worked, or we’d all be talking about this by telegraph.

The NYT has previously also previously sued OpenAI for infringement.

Read more: The actual complaint, NYT announcement, writeups on Reuters and CNBC

OpenAI loses privacy fight for ChatGPT message logs in NYT lawsuit

OpenAI is on the verge of losing its fight to keep their users' chat logs private, instead of turning them over to the NYT.
Your logs belongs belong to us, the NYT lawyers say, and the court agrees. (Picture: Adobe)
OpenAI has been fighting tooth and nail to preserve the privacy of their users’ messages in the lawsuit brought by The New York Times in 2023.

A new judgement could now mean they have to turn over more than 20 million chat logs, and many more messages, from the chatbot, reports Reuters.

The logs themselves should be anonymized by OpenAI in a way that pleases the court, but their content could be easy to pin down, and OpenAI has promised to appeal to the presiding Judge.

This is merely the discovery phase of the ongoing trial, where lawyers for the NYT have said the messages are necessary to discover whether ChatGPT did indeed copy verbatim text from them.

OpenAI must now first anonymize the logs, and then submit them to the court, and NYT’s attorneys, seven days later.

Read more: Reuters has the scoop.

U.S. patent office: AI is like any other tool, and can’t hold patents

AI is just another tool, says the USPTO, and it cannot legally hold patents.
The patent for AI discoveries should go to the user, the USPTO says in a filing. (Picture: Adobe)
The USPTO is out with new guidelines on AI, reported by Reuters, and says quite frankly that AI use is like any other tool, like «computer software, research databases» that «assists in the inventive process.»

They go on to say that AI may «provide services and generate ideas, but they remain tools used by the human inventor who conceived the claimed invention.»

Therefore, AI itself can’t be considered an inventor under current U.S. laws, the document says.

In a departure from Biden administration policies, where AI could be considered a co-inventor, the patent office now says «there is no separate or modified standard for AI-assisted inventions.»

That should mean that using AI to concieve of an invention means the user gets the patent, as with any other tool. This has yet to be tested in U.S. courts, Reuters reports.

Read more: The patent notice, writeups by Reuters, Engadget.