Is A.I. Above the Law? Our legal system isn’t ready for machines that act on their own.; The New Yorker, September 21, 2026

Jill Lepore , The New Yorker; Is A.I. Above the Law? Our legal system isn’t ready for machines that act on their own.

As the Copyright Act turns 50, the Copyright Office looks back at how the law has evolved; Federal News Network, September 23, 2026

Terry Gerton, Federal News Network; As the Copyright Act turns 50, the Copyright Office looks back at how the law has evolved

"Terry Gerton So Miriam, 50 years is a big birthday for anybody, but always for a law. What are the big things that people should know about the copyright law itself?

Miriam Lord Well, and a little bit of background about how it came to be, with instrumental support from the Copyright Office, Congress passed the Act to modernize copyright law for a rapidly changing world. It was signed into law on October 19th, 1976, so we’re celebrating a little early. The principal provisions took effect in 1978. The Office implemented the act, administers the act which includes the registration and recordation systems, and worked with Congress on amendments over time. When it was passed, the act broke new ground by making the copyright system more accessible to creators and users of creative works. And it continues to provide a framework that promotes the office’s constitutional mission."

Trump reveals millions of dollars' worth of share deals in big tech and AI; BBC, September 23, 2026

 

Dearbail Jordanand

Francisco Velasquez

, BBC; Trump reveals millions of dollars' worth of share deals in big tech and AI

"US President Donald Trump has disclosed millions of dollars' worth of stock market trades made during July, including in firms from Elon Musk's SpaceX to tech and AI giants such as Microsoft.

According to official documents, between $6.5m (£4.8m) and $31m worth of stock in Microsoft was sold on behalf of Trump, while they show purchases of between $165,000 and $400,000.

Across more than 1,000 trades, shares were bought and sold in AI company Nvidia and software firm Palantir, a contractor with the US defence department and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the filing shows."

Jensen Huang Thinks A.I. Alarmism Has Gone Too Far; The Ezra Klein Show, The New York Times, September 23, 2026

 

Ezra Klein

Produced by Rollin Hu

, The Ezra Klein Show, The New York Times; Jensen Huang Thinks A.I. Alarmism Has Gone Too Far

"I think one of the fundamental questions this gets at is: What is intelligence? Before you can even think about what it means to have intelligent machines, what is intelligence to you?

Well, there’s a technical formulation of intelligence. First of all, when people talk about intelligence and thinking and all of these things, of course there’s no formal definition for most people. But in the field of computer science, there is a formal definition, and the formal definition is perception, which is perceiving the world and understanding it.

Two, which is reasoning — reasoning is the ability to decompose any scenario and anything that you see, any experience, into more elemental parts.

And then third is planning toward an objective. That fundamental formulation applies to agentic systems, it applies to robotic systems — applies to self-driving cars.

And so you could see the industry building it layer by layer by layer, step by step by step, to the point where we now have what we perceive as intelligence."

Scoop: DOJ's copyright filing took key agencies by surprise; Axios, September 19, 2026

Sara Fischer, Kerry Flynn, Axios; Scoop: DOJ's copyright filing took key agencies by surprise

"The Department of Justice's statement of interest supporting OpenAI and Microsoft in the New York Times' copyright infringement lawsuit surprised critical agencies like the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the Copyright Office, sources told Axios.

Why it matters: Statements of interest allow the government to declare an official position on a legal matter in private lawsuits. While not binding, they can hold significant weight and help persuade cases.

Zoom in: The Times' lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft argues AI firms illegally stole their copyrighted works to train their large language models, and that AI-generated outputs unlawfully produced market substitutions.

• The DOJ's SOI argues copyrighted works to train models should be considered fair use because that practice is new and transformative, but also says outputs aren't necessarily covered by that same legal argument.
• 
  
• Unlike many SOIs, no career antitrust attorneys signed the filing alongside senior DOJ officials.
• 
  

Between the lines: Publishers have criticized the claims in the SOI, including the idea that enforcing copyright laws is too cumbersome and would threaten America's AI dominance over foreign rivals."

The Awesome and Alarming A.I. Visions of Anthropic’s C.E.O.; The New York Times, September 17, 2026

 David Streitfeld , The New York Times; The Awesome and Alarming A.I. Visions of Anthropic’s C.E.O.

"If there’s any comfort to be had here, it may be this: Fear and hype rarely make for good forecasts. As always, the future is uncharted."

For a century, journalists have had a voluntary ethics code. Editors are giving it an AI-era reboot; Associated Press via Fox40 News, September 1, 2026

 JOCELYN NOVECK, Associated Press via Fox40 News; For a century, journalists have had a voluntary ethics code. Editors are giving it an AI-era reboot

"Walk into a corner of a newsroom somewhere and you can often find it affixed to a bulletin board, perhaps peeking out from behind the coffee pot: the Society of Professional Journalists’s Code of Ethics. It’s less than a thousand words, fitting neatly on a poster. 

But those words — organized around four key journalistic principles — are important enough, asserts Dan Axelrod, that they just might save our democracy.

“I’m going to just say it,” says Axelrod, chairman of the SPJ Ethics Committee and former longtime Gannett business reporter. ”This is the way to protect democracy. This is to protect society. There but for the grace of God goes a society without journalists.”

Axelrod is talking not only about the existence of the code but the need, every so often, to update it. It’s a laborious process, taking about a year and countless hours of meetings and feedback, virtual and in person. 

Yet as the media landscape seems to shift daily and new technologies emerge, SPJ has decided that the time is at hand — for the first time in 12 years, and only the sixth in the code’s century-long history...

But why update in the first place? The first reason — hardly a surprise — is the rapid emergence of AI.

“We were thinking about artificial intelligence and how it’s used and sometimes misused by news organizations,” Roberts says, “as they confront that new technology that saves them money, but also causes a lot of trouble if it’s not used effectively and ethically.”

Another issue concerns the very term “professional journalists.” Recent years have seen a huge increase in independent, so-called “creator journalists.” The SPJ thinks they, too, should have a code to guide them. (The code, as always, is a voluntary guide and not enforceable.)

One key goal is to address an existential crisis in the field: an increasing lack of public trust in the media."

Why the Flock Backlash Has Gotten So Intense; The Atlantic, September 1, 2026

 David A. Graham , The Atlantic; Why the Flock Backlash Has Gotten So Intense

"As corporate names go, Flock is cleverly flexible. It evokes the many cameras that compose the company’s surveillance system and also a group of sheep, protected by a watchful shepherd. The recent backlash against the company, however, more closely resembles a flight of starlings, seeming to erupt out of nowhere and move as one unified body.

Flock Safety’s cameras are a network of automated license-plate readers (ALPRs), which snap images of passing cars and feed them into an AI-powered-data system. The company has contracts with police departments and government agencies as well as with some private companies. The crime-fighting power of such a tool isn’t hard to grasp: It allows law enforcement to track vehicles’ movements over any area where the readers exist. The privacy concerns about such a dragnet are just as easy to fathom."

EFF to Courts: Don’t Rewrite Copyright Over AI Hype; Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), August 31, 2026

TORI NOBLE AND CORYNNE MCSHERRY, Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF); EFF to Courts: Don’t Rewrite Copyright Over AI Hype

"It is not the place of courts to say these people are not artists or that AI cannot augment human creativity in a positive way."

A Society of Cheats; The Atlantic, August 30, 2026

 John Paul Rollert , The Atlantic; A Society of Cheats

Students’ use of AI is teaching them to cut corners, disdain rules, and believe that integrity is for suckers and wimps.

"By now, there have been many articles about how undergraduates’ promiscuous use of AI will affect their intellectual development, but I’m far more interested in its moral consequences. This is partly because I’m pretty confident about the former—I’ve told graduate students who actually learned how to write papers in college that I anticipate a generation of incompetents roughly a decade behind them—but also because I teach classes in leadership and business ethics, and I’m aghast at so many young people seemingly habituating themselves to cheating as a way of life.

Many students would no doubt object to this claim, but plainly that’s what they’re doing, cheating their way through their education. Every paper they don’t write, every problem set they don’t prepare, every serious reading they summarize into a memo—all of these are exercises in cutting corners, in getting by, and, at graduation time, in gaining a degree they didn’t earn.

That word is key: earn. To say that someone “earned” something is to apply a moral distinction to what one acquires. Not only can we get things we didn’t earn, but we can also obtain things we don’t deserve. The first is the good fortune of the trust-fund kid, the second the province of a thief.

Students are spending a lot of time learning to be thieves nowadays, and once they receive their dubious diplomas, they will enter the “real world” with all the qualities of a criminal syndicate: a knack for cutting corners, a disdain for community rules, and an assumption that a spirit of integrity, and the sacrifices it assumes, is the reserve of suckers and wimps. We will be a society of cheats."

Culture and ethics meets tech: UCLA debuts country’s first bachelor’s in digital humanities; LAist via Cal Matters, August 27, 2026

 Mikhail Zinshteyn, LAist via Cal Matters,; Culture and ethics meets tech: UCLA debuts country’s first bachelor’s in digital humanities

"UCLA is launching the nation’s first digital humanities department and bachelor’s degree this fall. The new discipline combines classical humanities with technical know-how to examine a digitized and increasingly AI-enhanced world.

The major fuses technological tools for statistical analysis, coding, 3D mapping and data visualization with traditional humanities subjects like history, literature and global cultures. It’s a multidisciplinary approach to education that capitalizes on employers’ growing desire for recent graduates to think critically while also being able to harness new technology. And the major requires a great deal of teamwork among students, another skill hiring managers seek.

Students will learn how new technologies shape culture and the human biases that enter into the use of these new tools. Top of mind is the rise of generative artificial intelligence and training students to use it ethically while also understanding how easily it can produce misleading content."

Sony, Warner sue Anthropic, alleging "blatant theft" of intellectual property; Axios, August 29, 2026

 Ben Berkowitz , Axios; Sony, Warner sue Anthropic, alleging "blatant theft" of intellectual property

"Some of the world's largest music publishers filed a blockbuster lawsuit against Anthropic late Friday night, alleging "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history."

Why it matters: The suit is the opening salvo in what is now likely to be a yearslong fight over music, AI, and how intellectual property is protected in a new era of technology.

Driving the news: Units of Sony Music and Warner Music filed the suit in federal court in northern California late Friday night, naming Anthropic, CEO Dario Amodei and co-founder Benjamin Mann as defendants. 

The big picture: The Sony/Warner lawsuit is notable because it's broad.

It alleges Anthropic unlawfully trained its models off "tens of thousands" of music publishers' copyrighted compositions, whereas other lawsuits have focused on a narrower set of works.

BMG's lawsuit against Anthropic, for example, claims infringement against 493 compositions."

The AI Backlash Gets Professional; The Atlantic, August 28, 2026

Matteo Wong, The Atlantic; The AI Backlash Gets Professional

"If there’s one thing America seems to agree on, it’s AI. Some three-quarters of Americans oppose a data center being built in their area,three-quarters of Americans think AI will hurt their job security, nearly70 percent think the technology is advancing too quickly—the polls go on. Progressive and Republican candidates alike are bashing the tech industry to win primary elections. States and cities are halting plans for data-center development.

Yet in cloistered San Francisco, where I live, staffers at OpenAI and Anthropic are developing this same feared technology at light speed and pulling down compensation packages that stretch to considerably more than $1 million. Silicon Valley’s growth is largely unencumbered by regulation, and President Trump’s administration has if anything used its authority to speed the AI industry along. The divide between these camps—the majority of people in this country who simply have to deal with the technology as it’s rolled out, and the much smaller population of people with direct influence over it—is adefining feature of this era. And so I noticed when a small group, with ties to both the Bay Area and Washington, started making noise, insisting that the AI race slow down and the technology be overseen not by executives and engineers, but by the broadest population possible."

TIME Reveals the 2026 TIME100 AI List of the World’s Most Influential People in Artificial Intelligence; TIME, August 27, 2026

TIME PR , Time; TIME Reveals the 2026 TIME100 AI List of the World’s Most Influential People in Artificial Intelligence

"Today, TIME reveals the fourth annual TIME100 AI list, recognizing the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence. 

The 2026 TIME100 AI issue includes one worldwide cover featuring listmakers, Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Jeff Bezos, Doreen Bogdan-Martin, Marian Croak, Larry Ellison, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Paris Hilton, Lila Ibrahim, Arvind Krishna, Fei-Fei Li, Mira Murati, Elon Musk, David Sacks, Liz Shuler, Ilya Sutskever, and Eddie Wu. 

Published alongside the TIME100 AI are in-depth interviews with Thinking Machines Lab chief executive officer Mira Murati, Secretary-General of the International Telecommunication Union Doreen Bogdan-Martin and OpenEvidence founder and chief executive officer Daniel Nadler."

From Napster to Sampling to AI: Copyright Law’s Role as the Sheriff to Emerging Technology; JD Supra, August 25, 2026

Richard Busch , JD Supra; From Napster to Sampling to AI: Copyright Law’s Role as the Sheriff to Emerging Technology

"Copyright law rarely meets new technology at the start. More often, it arrives after technology, and those behind it seeking to push (or ignore) the law for monetary gain have already changed markets, habits, and expectations. In music, that pattern has repeated across many major technological shifts. This article focuses on several: digital sampling, which made fragments of existing recordings newly usable in the studio; digital downloads, which changed the economics of distribution; interactive streaming, which made all music available for license on demand; platform music libraries, which embedded music into social media tools; and artificial intelligence, where those building literally trillion dollar businesses have trained on copyrighted works, and used others’ voice and likeness. In each of these instances, creators and rights holders have had to ask courts, Congress, or regulators to apply existing legal frameworks to commercial realities.

My work in music copyright litigation has often involved a recurring collision between music, technology, and copyright law."

Bill Gates calls for ‘human-reserved’ jobs in face of AI takeover; The Guardian, August 26, 2026

 Mark Sweney, The Guardian ; Bill Gates calls for ‘human-reserved’ jobs in face of AI takeover

"Bill Gates has called for “human-reserved” jobs in certain sectors to prevent AI replacing them, and expressed concern that governments are not prepared for the impact the technology will have.

In a 6,000 word essay titled The turbulent AI era is here. The choices we make are critical, the billionaire Microsoft co-founder likened the need to spare roles from digital encroachment to how nature reserves operate to protect the environment.

“Many jobs will disappear forever,” he said, in his first lengthy piece on AI in three years. “I believe that as AI and robots improve, we’ll set aside certain things for only people to do.

“I’ve started calling this domain human reserved. I like the phrase human reserved because it makes me think of nature reserves – places where we could put buildings and roads, but we choose not to because the loss would be too great.”"

Ella Baron on AI and the drought – cartoon; The Guardian, August 23, 2026

 Ella Baron, The Guardian; Ella Baron on AI and the drought – cartoon

Pope Leo XIV: In age of AI, the family is the first school of humanity; Vatican News, August 22, 2026

Deborah Castellano Lubov, Vatican News; Pope Leo XIV: In age of AI, the family is the first school of humanity

""Sound legislation should encourage scientific and technological creativity while safeguarding fundamental human rights and freedoms.  It should protect users from exploitation, preserve personal privacy, ensure transparency in the use of emerging technologies and guarantee that they strengthen democratic institutions."

Pope Leo XIV expressed this conviction to the International Catholic Legislators Network in the Vatican on Friday.

Reflecting on legislation, the Pope reiterated that “robust legal frameworks, independent oversight, informed users and a political system that does not abdicate its responsibility are required.”

He observed that such oversight can operate at multiple levels — local, national and international — facilitating open discussion of “the ethical frameworks involved and subjecting them to shared standards of social justice,” ensuring "that no single ideology or interest dictates the values embedded in artificial intelligence systems."

At the same time, the Holy Father underscored, the rapid development of artificial intelligence risks creating new forms of technological dependence, with poorer nations increasingly reliant on wealthier ones.  

Subtle forms of domination

"We must remain vigilant in this regard," he said, "lest innovation become another vehicle for ideological or economic colonialism."

Sadly, he lamented, "we are presented with a subtle form of domination when algorithms decide who is seen, and who remains invisible, when digital platforms shape public discourse without accountability, and when the dignity of workers is subordinated to the optimization of systems."  

Such developments, Pope Leo warned, "reveal a new face of the ancient temptation to domination and mastery without service."

The family as the first school of humanity

Against this culture of power, the Holy Father suggested, the Church proposes “the civilization of love.”"

The slow sucking sound of AI; Financial Times, August 19, 2026

 SOUMAYA KEYNES, Financial Times; The slow sucking sound of AI

"When AI has solved cancer and climate change, no one will be sniping about whether too much money and electricity were poured into the industry."

Legal Battle Over U.S. Copyright Chief Heats Up Again; Publishing Perspectives, August 4, 2026

Andrew Albanese, Publishing Perspectives; Legal Battle Over U.S. Copyright Chief Heats Up Again

"In the United States, a legal battle over the future of the nation’s top copyright officer, Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter, is heating up again. In a legal filing last week, Administration lawyers told a Washington D.C. court that a recent Supreme Court decision bolstered their case that President Trump has the power to fire Perlmutter. But in a filing of their own, lawyers for Perlmutter reiterate that the president lacks such authority, arguing that, as an appeals court ruled last fall, the law gives that authority to the U.S. Librarian of Congress.

The legal drama began last May, when Trump purportedly fired Perlmutter, just two days after the shock firing of Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden. The firing surprised and outraged stakeholders in the copyright and Intellectual Property communities, who have given Perlmutter high marks for her work at the office, including significant progress on a much-needed modernization effort.

More concerning, however, Perlmutter’s attempted firing came immediately following the prepublication release of the Copyright Office’s third and final part of a wide-ranging AI review, which argued for the rights of copyright owners—an opinion that appears to clash with the president’s AI goals."