Legal

The New York Times and several other newspapers have filed federal lawsuits against web browser company Brave, alleging it scraped their copyrighted content using an unidentified crawler. The publishers claim Brave acted as a distributor of stolen data by selling the scraped articles to AI companies including Anthropic, Perplexity, Mistral, xAI, and Cohere.

Anthropic updated the system prompt for Claude Code and its Claude Opus 5.5 model to prohibit the recreation of specific existing video games. Although the rule instructs the AI to build only original games rather than clones, observers note it is unlikely to halt the broader trend of AI-assisted game copying and porting.

A federal judge denied xAI's motion to dismiss an NAACP lawsuit alleging the company violated the Clean Air Act by operating at least 35 unpermitted gas turbines at its Colossus data center. The court rejected xAI's arguments that the turbines are exempt as mobile sources and that citizen lawsuits are unconstitutional.

OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Anthropic have agreed to adopt a unified standard allowing publishers to opt out of AI web scraping across multiple companies simultaneously. Proposed through the Internet Engineering Task Force by an Anthropic technical lead, the shared policy token will operate within a website's existing robots.txt file.

The US Department of Justice has charged five individuals and seized over $750,000 in cryptocurrency in a crackdown on fraudulent "ghost students" who steal American identities to obtain student loans. According to federal officials, the large-scale international scheme relied in part on artificial intelligence to complete coursework and defraud financial aid programs.

Meta updated its commercial terms of use to permit scraping and using content from connected business websites to develop its products, sparking backlash from artists and small businesses. Users in the UK and EU can opt out of having their data used for Meta AI via privacy settings due to GDPR and the AI Act, an option unavailable to US users.

A man in Kentucky has reportedly become the first humanist to be granted a religious exemption from using artificial intelligence. The article is referenced only by its headline and link, providing no further details about the context of the exemption.

Retiring head of England's civil justice system, Judge Geoffrey Vos, argues in an interview that AI should eventually be used to adjudicate simpler civil disputes like personal injury and low-value negligence claims. He also notes that county court filings are rising by 10 percent annually as citizens increasingly use chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini to draft legal claims.

A proposal in Delaware aims to create a new corporate entity called an Artificial Intelligence Company, which would allow businesses to be operated by AI agents. US Representative James Comer has requested documents regarding the plan, warning that it could allow human owners and investors to evade legal responsibility for harmful AI actions.