Megan McArdle , The Washington Post; I told the internet I use AI. Boy, was it mad.
"...Many people think that using AI at any stage of the writing process amounts to outsourcing your thinking to a machine, and they reacted badly to a journalist suggesting some AI use might be all right.
Obviously, I disagree, but I recognize those folks are grappling with important questions, such as “What is writing for?” and “Which uses of AI serve those purposes, and which undermine them?”"
Emma Loffhagen, The Guardian; The New York Times drops freelance journalist who used AI to write book review
"The New York Times has cut ties with a freelance journalist after discovering he used artificial intelligence to help write a book review that echoed elements of a review of the same book in the Guardian.
It came after a New York Times reader flagged similarities between the paper’s January review of Watching Over Her by Jean-Baptiste Andrea,written by author and journalist Alex Preston, and an August review of the same book written by Christobel Kent in the Guardian.
The New York Times launched an investigation, during which Preston admitted that he had used AI to assist writing the review and did not spot the sections that were pulled from the Guardian before submitting it. In a statement to the Guardian on Tuesday, Preston said that he was “hugely embarrassed” and had “made a serious mistake”."
AARON MAK , Politico; The Copyright Act in the age of AI
"The Copyright Act is reaching a major milestone this year, yet some legal scholars aren’t sure how well it will hold up in the age of artificial intelligence.
Stanford University held a summit on Friday to celebrate (and fret about) the 1976 act, which is the foundation of modern copyright law, as the 50th anniversary of its signing approaches in October. Academics advanced a number of proposals to update and reinterpret American copyright law, though several also warned against stretching it too far. The consensus: AI will reshape copyright whether we like it or not, and that it’s time to grapple with the implications."
Associated Press via The Guardian; Iowa can restrict LGBTQ+ books and topics at schools, appellate court rules
Ruling, vacating lower court’s temporary block, applies to classrooms and libraries up to sixth grade
"Iowa can enforce a law that restricts teachers from talking about LGBTQ+ topics with students in kindergarten through the sixth grade and bans some books in libraries and classrooms, an appellate court said on Monday.
The decision for now vacates a lower court judge’s temporary blocks on the law.
The measure was first approved by Republican majorities in the Iowa house and senate and the Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, in 2023, which they said reinforced age-appropriate education in kindergarten through 12th grades. It has been a back-and-forth battle in the courts in the three years since lawsuits were filed by the Iowa State Education Association, major publishing houses and bestselling authors, as well as Iowa Safe Schools, an LGBTQ+ advocacy organization."
Renee Dudley , ProPublica; The Federal Government Is Rushing Toward AI. Our Reporting Offers Three Cautionary Tales.
"This emerging technology has its grip on everyone: Home users, corporations and the federal government are all rushing to use it. President Donald Trump and his Cabinet say AI will transform the nation, making us more prosperous, efficient and secure — if only we can adopt it fast enough.
But this messaging isn’t new. President Barack Obama’s administration used nearly identical language a decade and a half ago as the U.S. barreled into the technological revolution of cloud computing.
I’ve studied how the federal government has handled — and mishandled — this transition over the past two decades, and my reporting offers some cautionary tales and valuable lessons as policymakers encourage the use of AI and federal agencies adopt the technology."
Blake Brittain , Reuters; US music publishers suing Anthropic make their case against AI 'fair use'
"Music publishers Universal Music Group , Concord and ABKCO have asked a judge in California to rule that U.S. copyright law does not insulate artificial intelligence startup Anthropic from liability for copying their song lyrics to train its AI-powered chatbot Claude.
The publishers' request , filed on Monday in federal court in San Jose, tees up a critical question in the legal battle between creators and tech companies: Does the doctrine of "fair use" apply to the copying of millions of copyrighted works to train AI models?"
Marketers move to get ahead of growing consumer skepticism by labeling content that doesn’t use AI
"As the AI-generated imagery and video colloquially called slop spreads across social media and video feeds, marketers are going out of their way to tell consumers they’re not to blame.
For some, it’s part of a message about authenticity that they want to send to their customers.
“We commit: No AI generated bodies or people,” promised a campaign last month from Aerie, the intimate apparel brand owned by American Eagle Outfitters."
STEVE BRACHMANN, IP Watchdog; Contentious House USPTO Oversight Hearing Centers on PTAB Reforms, Trump’s Political Influence
"Today, the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, Artificial Intelligence, and the Internet conducted its first oversight hearing of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) during the second Trump Administration. The harshest lines of questioning for USPTO Director John Squires during the hearing were reserved for the agency’s notice of proposed rulemaking(NPRM) to reform rules of practice at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) as well as President Trump’s political influence at the agency. During the hearing, Squires also confirmed that the agency’s Patent Public Advisory Committee (PPAC) would soon be revived, following an offer to join PPAC extended last night to an undisclosed independent inventor...
The full House Judiciary Committee’s Ranking Member, Jamie Raskin (D-MD), also hammered Director Squires on President Trump’s influence, raising questions throughout the hearing about the USPTO’s role in filing two trademark applications for “Board of Peace” on behalf of President Trump...
Rep. Zoe Lofgren’s (D-CA) concerns over Squires’ PTAB reforms involved not just the centralization of decision-making authority over IPR proceedings but the lack of explanation for decisions to not institute or de-institute stemming from what Lofgren called “barebones summary denials.” Squires responded that PTAB judges work from a record of more than 600 written decisions, and that controversial reforms like settled expectations have cut both ways in favor of patent owners and challengers. However, Lofgren commented that the 64% of IPRs discretionarily denied under Director Squires was due to the adoption of discretionary considerations and a centralized Director review process acting as barriers that Congress never envisioned."
Frank Landymore, Futurism; Anthropic Suddenly Cares Intensely About Intellectual Property After Realizing With Horror That It Accidentally Leaked Claude’s Source Code
As the Wall Street Journal reports, Anthropic is scrambling to contain a leak of its Claude Code AI model’s source code by issuing a copyright takedown request for more than 8,000 copies of it — a gallingly ironic stance for the company to be taking, considering how it trained its models in the first place.
The leak isn’t considered to be an outright disaster; no customer data was exposed, Anthropic says, nor were the internal mathematical “weights” that determine how the AI “learns” and which distinguish it from other models. But it did expose the techniques its engineers used to get its AI model to act as an autonomous agent, a form of digital infrastructure coders call a harness, and other tricks for making the AI operate as seamlessly as it does.
Hence Anthropic’s copyright takedown request, which targets the thousands of copies that were shared on GitHub. It later narrowed its request from 8,000 copies to 96 copies, according to the WSJ reporting, claiming that the initial one covered more accounts than intended.
It’s certainly within Anthropic’s right to issue the takedown request, but the hypocrisy of Anthropic running to the law to protect its intellectual property is plain to see, especially for a company that’s relentlessly positioned itself as the ethical adult in the room."
Anthropic, Claude's Constitution
Our vision for Claude's character
"Claude’s constitution is a detailed description of Anthropic’s intentions for Claude’s values and behavior. It plays a crucial role in our training process, and its content directly shapes Claude’s behavior. It’s also the final authority on our vision for Claude, and our aim is for all of our other guidance and training to be consistent with it.
Training models is a difficult task, and Claude’s behavior might not always reflect the constitution’s ideals. We will be open—for example, in our system cards—about the ways in which Claude’s behavior comes apart from our intentions. But we think transparency about those intentions is important regardless.
The document is written with Claude as its primary audience, so it might read differently than you’d expect. For example, it’s optimized for precision over accessibility, and it covers various topics that may be of less interest to human readers. We also discuss Claude in terms normally reserved for humans (e.g., “virtue,” “wisdom”). We do this because we expect Claude’s reasoning to draw on human concepts by default, given the role of human text in Claude’s training; and we think encouraging Claude to embrace certain human-like qualities may be actively desirable.
This constitution is written for our mainline, general-access Claude models. We have some models built for specialized uses that don’t fully fit this constitution; as we continue to develop products for specialized use cases, we will continue to evaluate how to best ensure our models meet the core objectives outlined in this constitution.
For a summary of the constitution, and for more discussion of how we’re thinking about it, see our blog post “Claude’s new constitution.”
Powerful AI models will be a new kind of force in the world, and people creating them have a chance to help them embody the best in humanity. We hope this constitution is a step in that direction.
We’re releasing Claude’s constitution in full under a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Deed, meaning it can be freely used by anyone for any purpose without asking for permission.
Many people at Anthropic and beyond contributed to the creation of this document, as did several Claude models. Amanda Askell is the primary author and wrote the majority of the text. Joe Carlsmith wrote significant parts of many sections and played a core role in revising the text. Chris Olah, Jared Kaplan, and Holden Karnofsky made significant contributions to its content and development. More detailed contribution statement and acknowledgments below.
The preface and the acknowledgements are not part of the official constitution."
, Observer; The Catholic Priest Who Helped Write Anthropic’s A.I. Ethics Code
"Father Brendan McGuire is writing a novel about a disenchanted monk and his A.I. companion. He’s doing it with Claude. That detail—a Catholic priest using Anthropic’s chatbot to explore questions of faith and artificial consciousness—tells you something about where Silicon Valley’s moral reckoning has arrived. McGuire, 60, leads St. Simon Catholic Parish in Los Altos, Calif., a congregation that counts some of the Valley’s A.I. researchers among its members. Earlier this year, he and a group of faith leaders helped Anthropic shape the Claude Constitution, the set of guiding principles governing how its A.I. behaves.
He is not, in other words, an outside critic. He is something more complicated: a true believer in both God and technology, trying to hold them in the same hand. “I left the tech industry, but it never really left me,” McGuire told Observer...
McGuire wasn’t Anthropic’s only religious collaborator. Bishop Paul Tighe of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Culture and Education and Brian Patrick Green, a technology ethics director at Santa Clara University, also reviewed the Claude Constitution. Green and other Catholic scholars recently filed a federal court brief supporting Anthropic in its lawsuit against the U.S. government, which challenges the company’s effective blacklisting by the Pentagon after it refused to allow its A.I. systems to be used for autonomous warfare or domestic surveillance. The brief praised those ethical limits as “minimal standards of ethical conduct for technical progress.”...
Anthropic says its engagement with religious voices—part of a broader effort to engage a wide variety of communities to keep pace with technological acceleration—is only a beginning. The company plans to expand outreach beyond Catholic institutions to other religious leaders going forward."
, The New York Times ; What Teens Are Doing With Those Role-Playing Chatbots
"There are a growing number of companies offering social chatbots that can act like friends, enemies, lovers, adventurous companions, or the manifestation of a fictional or real person you’ve always wanted to meet. You can pick A.I. Elon Musk’s brain or spar with A.I. Draco Malfoy. The myriad characters, often created by fellow users, offer drama, romance, therapy and LOLs.
Apps that feature role-playing chatbots are used by tens of millions of people, with engagement times that rival or surpass those of social media behemoths such as TikTok, according to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. The majority of teens surveyed by Pew use A.I. chatbots, with one out of 11 saying they had used Character.AI.
“If you think your child is not talking to chatbot companions, you’re probably wrong,” said Mitch Prinstein, co-director of the Winston Center on Technology and Brain Development at U.N.C. Chapel Hill.
Chatbots are surging in popularity as society is still grappling with how social media has affected young people; a wave of lawsuits is moving through the courts seeking damages from companies that plaintiffs say have deliberately created addictive products. (A jury in California recently found that Meta and YouTube were liable for $6 million in damages to one young woman.) And now parents and caregivers have a new attention-absorbing technology to reckon with.
At the beginning of last year, a high school teacher in Chicago told me that some of her students were dating chatbots, and she worried that they were having their first erotic experiences with them. I wanted to find out what teens had to say about that, so I joined communities devoted to social chatbot apps on the online messaging forum Discord. I introduced myself as a reporter and “an old,” and explained that I was interested in talking to young people who used the services regularly."
[Video] CBS; Small Kansas town gets its first library after mysterious donation
"Frontenac, Kansas, is a community of 3,000 residents. When its city administrator received a mysterious $4.6 million dolllar donation from a couple whose dying wish was for a library to be built, the town sprung into action to solidify its legacy."
Terrence O'Brien, The Verge; A folk musician became a target for AI fakes and a copyright troll
"The worlds of generative AI, music distribution, and copyright are complex with multiple points of failure and opportunities for abuse."
, CBS News; Mysterious donation gives small Kansas town its first public library
"For over 140 years, the small town of Frontenac, Kansas had almost everything its 3,000 residents needed – except a public library.
All that changed when city administrator John Zafuta got an unexpected phone call in 2019.
"It was a surprise," Zafuta said. "An attorney told us that we were the sole beneficiary of the Tavella family trust."
Richard and Jeanette Tavella had both grown up in Frontenac before moving north to Kansas City, where Jeanette worked as a librarian until her death in 2019. Richard had died the year before. The couple wanted to use their parting gift to write a new legacy in their hometown. The town would receive $4.6 million from their estate, and use it to build Frontenac's first public library...
Building a space for community
Seth Nutt, a teacher, historian and Frontenac native, was brought on as the library's director...
Today, its shelves hold over 17,000 titles. The library also hosts activities catered to different age groups, including story time for children, cooking classes for teens and book clubs for adults. It's also home to the McKay Street Coffeehouse and the Heritage Hall Museum. The museum is the first dedicated exclusively to Frontenac's history, and is also overseen by Nutt.
"You hear people debate, do you need a library, do you not? And once you see it, and once you see how involved the community is with it, we've definitely needed it," said fire lieutenant and building inspector Justin Ziesenis, who had brought his six-year-old daughter to the library to pick out books.
"I think it has made a difference in this community. It's drawing more people here, and more students are getting involved with reading books," said eighth-grader Rylinn Girth-Barnow, who had come to the library for a cooking class."
"US Copyright Office Director Shira Perlmutter said the Supreme Court put “little thought” into the implications of its recent decision absolving an internet service provider for not shuttering accounts of users who repeatedly pirated music.
"The throwing out of many, many decades of copyright law on secondary liability so quickly and with so little analysis was shocking," Perlmutter said Friday at a Stanford Law School event."
Megan Morrone, Axios ; AI agents are scrambling power users' brains
"A growing number of software developers say AI coding tools are frying their brains.
The big picture: The most popular agentic AI systems have triggered something that looks a lot like addiction among some of tech's highest performers."
Gaby Hinsliff, The Guardian; ‘Occasionally a picture can change the course of history’: 33 scandalous photos that shocked the world
"The Bullingdon Club photograph, 1987
By Rona Marsden
In 2007, the Mail on Sunday published a photograph taken 20 years earlier: a group portrait of the Bullingdon Club’s class of 1987. Ten young members appear in the bespoke uniform of the exclusive all-male “dining club” at the University of Oxford. Among them are two future luminaries of the Conservative party: David Cameron (standing, second left) and Boris Johnson (seated on the right).
The club’s reputation as a drinking society for badly behaved posh boys – in 1987, a plant pot was thrown out of a window during a Bullingdon party – made the photo a source of embarrassment for Cameron, then leader of the opposition. “We do things when we are young that we deeply regret,” he said in 2009.
Soon after, the company that holds the copyright for the image withdrew permission to republish it. This painting by Oxford-based artist Rona Marsden was commissioned by BBC Newsnight as an alternative. The image remains a striking illustration of the elitism of Britain’s ruling class, and the vast inequality within the country. GS"
Bernie Sanders , The Wall Street Journal; AI Is a Threat to Everything the American People Hold Dear. It kills jobs, equality, connection, democracy and maybe the human race. Congress must act.
"The American people are deeply apprehensive about the impact that artificial intelligence will have on their lives. A recent Quinnipiac poll found that 55% of Americans think AI will do more harm than good, 70% think AI will lead to fewer jobs, and only 5% think AI development is being led by people and organizations that represent their interests.
In the midst of all of this deep concern about the future of AI, 74% of Americans think the government isn't doing enough to regulate the use of AI."
Mike Isaac, The New York Times ; OpenAI Buys Streaming Show ‘TBPN,’ Aiming to Change Narrative on A.I.
"On Thursday, OpenAI said it had bought “TBPN” for an undisclosed amount and would continue to support it as the show promoted the business of technology and media."
AMANDA ROBERT, ABA Journal ; Sanctions ramping up in cases involving AI hallucinations
"The use of monetary sanctions against attorneys is seemingly on the rise as courts continue to address artificial intelligence-generated hallucinations in case documents."
Alex Isenstadt , Axios; Exclusive: Trump's DOJ says he's not required to turn over official records
[Kip Currier: This is an appalling anti-democratic determination by Trump 2.0's DOJ. The post-Watergate Presidential Records Act of 1978 was enacted through bipartisan legislating, signed into law by President Jimmy Carter, to curb government corruption and promote transparency, in the wake of actions by Pres. Richard M. Nixon and his administration. The Act codifies that presidential records are the property of the federal government, not the President and the Executive Branch, and are public records.
Democratically-elected officials must be accountable to their citizenries. The Presidential Records Act represents a vital means, among others, for holding Presidents and their administrations accountable for their actions by ensuring preservation of and access to their records by present and future generations.]
"President Trump's Justice Department has concluded that a federal law requiring presidential records to be turned over to the government is unconstitutional, a senior White House official tells Axios.
Why it matters: The finding is an indication Trump will be reluctant to give all of his official records to the National Archives at the end of his term, as presidents have done for nearly a half-century under the Presidential Records Act of 1978.
The law, passed in the post-Watergate era as a hedge against government corruption, states that every official record regarding a president's decisions or policies belongs to the U.S. government, not the president."
Emily Cochrane and Sonia A. Rao, The New York Times ; Library Director in Tennessee Fired for Refusing to Move Gender-Themed Books
The director, Luanne James, was fired at a board meeting for the Rutherford County Library System on Monday after she refused to move certain books to the adult section.
"It is still an uncertain moment for Ms. James, who had taken the position believing it would be where she would finish out her career. And she remains overwhelmed by both the scrutiny and public attention, even if there is nothing she would do differently.
“I’m just a librarian,” she said. “That’s who I am.”"
Eleanor Hawkins, Axios; AI gaps in the boardroom are becoming a reputational risk
"The big picture: Companies across every industry are being forced into rapid AI-driven transformation, but many corporate boards lack the expertise to guide strategy, manage risk or communicate decisions credibly to stakeholders.
By the numbers: Only 39% of Fortune 100 boards have any form of AI oversight, such as committees, a director with AI expertise, or an ethics board, according to McKinsey research.
Another recent report found that only 13% of S&P 500 companies have at least one director with AI-related expertise.
Similarly, McKinsey's survey of directors found that 66% say their boards have "limited to no knowledge or experience" with AI, and nearly one in three say AI does not even appear on their agendas.
And a report from the National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD) found that only 17% have established an AI education plan for directors, and 6% have a dedicated committee to oversee AI.
Between the lines: Having an AI-savvy board is a major competitive advantage, according to a recent MIT study."
Jeffrey D. Dyess, Bradley Arant Boult Cummings LLP , The National Law Review ; The Supreme Court’s Decision on Indirect Internet Copyright Liability Could Have Far-Reaching Effects
"On March 25, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered a landmark decision that will reshape not only how copyright law applies to the internet for years to come, but could impact other areas of intellectual property law as well. In Cox Communications, Inc. v. Sony Music Entertainment, the Court held that internet service providers cannot be held indirectly liable for their customers’ copyright infringement simply because the ISPs knew the infringement was happening but failed to prevent it. The decision reversed and remanded a billion-dollar judgment against ISP Cox Communications and drew a more clearly defined line around secondary copyright liability."
Clare Armstrong , Australian Broadcasting Corporation; Anthropic boss makes big call on Australian copyright as artists say pay up
"In short:
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has told a Canberra forum AI is moving faster than any technological change before it.
Mr Amodei says he is not trying to change Australia's mind on copyright, is worried about AI in the hands of autocratic countries, and feels a tax on profits is inevitable.
The $555 billion company behind AI program Claude is facing pushback from artists over the use of copyrighted material to train its technology."
United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) ; USPTO announces agentic AI-assisted evaluator for patent eligibility determinations
"As part of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's (USPTO) continued efforts to incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) into agency operations—first with the Artificial Intelligence Search Automated Pilot Program, or “ASAP!,” for patent prior art references followed by the Trademark Classification Agentic Codification Tool, or “Class ACT,” for trademark searching—the USPTO today announced the first-of-its-kind agentic AI tool to assist in patent eligibility determinations under 35 U.S.C. §101.
America’s Innovation Agency’s new AI system, termed “McConaughey Agentic Tasking Technology Helping Examiner Workload,” or “MATTHEW,” for short, will help examiners tackle the thorniest of eligibility questions as to whether claims presented are an abstract idea or a patent-eligible invention. “MATTHEW will greatly enhance our ability to make the close calls—or any call, really—as I herewith also suspend all applicable precedent, including Desjardins, Alice, and Mayo,” said USPTO Director John A. Squires. “Basically, in terms of eligibility, if MATTHEW says your invention is ‘Alright, Alright, Alright,’ then it’s ‘Alright, Alright, Alright’ with the USPTO.”
“Initially, we had some concerns that we would be introducing a three-part test in place of the two-part test under Alice and Mayo, but I think we’ll be al…um, okay,” he continued.
“We want to equip our examiners—the best in the world at what they do—with the best tools to assist them,” said Director Squires. “In fact, MATTHEW was selected after careful evaluation of best-in-breed offerings, including the ‘Binary Eligibility Engaged Translation Language Environment Joint User Interface Computational Evaluator,’ or ‘BEETLEJUICE,’” he stated. “But the coders had some issues in testing when they said the name three times. I hope they’ll be al…um, okay,” remarked the Director.
When asked if the USPTO licensed its tool in light of famed actor McConaughey’s recent Name Image and Likeness (NIL) ‘non-traditional’ registrations, Director Squires retorted, “Well, he’s the one who said, ‘trademark yourself!’—I think the Founders would have wanted this.” When asked if he had heard from Mr. McConaughey’s lawyers, Director Squires produced an unintelligible, guttural chanting sound and began rhythmically beating his chest with his fist.
For more information on this trailblazing AI system, please visit the USPTO website."
