The philosopher trying to teach ethics to AI developers; NPR, April 17, 2026

 Manoush Zomorodi, Fiona Geiran, Katie Monteleone, James Delahoussaye, Sanaz Meshkinpour, NPR ; The philosopher trying to teach ethics to AI developers

"Sullivan is a philosophy professor at Notre Dame and the author of The Good Life Method: Reasoning Through the Big Questions of Happiness, Faith, and Meaning. Through Notre Dame's Institute for Ethics and the Common Good, she is meeting with AI leaders and developers to apply an ethical framework for AI — basically give AI a moral compass. Her mission is as ambitious as it sounds, but she is backed by Notre Dame's $50.8 million grant from the Lilly Endowment to champion philosophy and theology in the national conversation around AI.

Her reception in Silicon Valley has been mixed. She describes occasionally hearing comments akin to: "That's cute that you think that topics like virtue and justice could still be relevant in our world." But she finds that most developers are open and genuinely curious about philosophy. "I come out here, and I think, my gosh, I've been training for this for 25 years to have this conversation with you, says Sullivan. "And I'm so glad that now you're ready to do it."

In March, she attended Anthropic's 2-day summit, where Christian leaders discussed how Claude should approach the messy moral questions humans are bringing to chatbots. For instance, how should Claude react to a user who's grieving? What should it do when someone is at risk for self-harm?"

Thousands of authors seek share of Anthropic copyright settlement; Reuters, April 17, 2026

Blake Brittain , Reuters; Thousands of authors seek share of Anthropic copyright settlement

"Nearly 120,000 authors and other copyright holders are seeking a share of a $1.5 billion class-action settlement with Anthropic over the company's unauthorized use of their books in artificial-intelligence training, according to a ​filing in California federal court.

Claims have been filed for 91% of the more than 480,000 ‌works covered by the settlement, according to a court filing  in the case on Thursday.

A judge will consider whether to grant final approval to the settlement – the largest ever in a U.S. copyright case – at a hearing next month.

Anthropic was the first and ​remains the only major AI company to settle a U.S. class-action by copyright holders alleging AI ​platforms used their work without permission to train their systems."

The Tyranny of AI Everywhere; The Atlantic, April 16, 2026

 Alexandra Petri, The Atlantic ; The Tyranny of AI Everywhere

Sneakers? Why stop there?

"I had the strangest dream. I dreamed that my shoes—my comfortable, unfashionable wool shoes—were pivoting to AI. “But you’re a shoe company,” I said. “Just go out of business! Keep your dignity!”

My shoes thanked me politely for the great question and then tried to walk me off a bridge. That was how I knew that their pivot to AI was complete. From Allbirds to AIlbirds (see, that L is an I!). Maybe I’ve cracked, I said to myself. Maybe this is the piece of AI news that has finally broken my spirit for good...

I tried to sit down on a bench, but the bench company had pivoted to AI. I couldn’t sit down, but the bench did tell me that I was right about everything. My newspaper had become AI a while ago, so there was nothing to read—or, rather, there were things to read, but I could not tell whether any of them were true. I thought I would go to a museum to cheer myself up. The paintings there had pivoted to AI (pAIntings), and their subjects were all following me with their eyes, not just Mona Lisa

“There’s a place for AI,” I said. “But … not everywhere.”

“I’m sorry,” the painting said. “I didn’t want this either, but everyone is doing it!”...

“It’s fine,” my grandmother said. I was surprised to hear from her, because as far as I knew, she was dead. “I’m not dead,” she said. “I’m just pivoting to AI, like that shoe company. Nothing dies anymore. It just becomes AI.”"

AI Startups Have These Copyright Lawyers on Speed Dial; Bloomberg Law, April 16, 2026

 David Schultz , Bloomberg Law; AI Startups Have These Copyright Lawyers on Speed Dial

"Something similar connects many of the top attorneys representing the artificial intelligence industry in its most consequential battles: their resumes.

The common thread is Durie Tangri. More than 50 attorneys from the defunct Bay Area intellectual property firm are at the center of epic Silicon Valley copyright fights, just more than three years after Morrison Foerster acquired the practice...

“Tech copyright is a small world,” said Joseph Gratz, one of the alums at Morrison.

The Durie Tangri alums have benefited from the demand in tech copyright law, said Gratz, who has appeared in court defending OpenAI in almost two dozen federal lawsuits...

One of the marquee cases Durie Tangri took on was the decade-long copyright infringement suit over Google’s book digitization. Sonal Mehta, a Durie Tangri alum who is now at WilmerHale, said the boutique relished taking on matters that ventured into uncharted territory.

“We weren’t afraid to be operating in gray areas or to be looking at where the law hadn’t fully developed,” Mehta said. “We didn’t need to feel like every argument had to be something that was a cookie cutter argument that had already been made and won 20 times before.”"

AI Is Getting Smarter. Catching Its Mistakes Is Getting Harder.; The Wall Street Journal, April 14, 2026

  

Katherine Blunt , The Wall Street Journal ; AI Is Getting Smarter. Catching Its Mistakes Is Getting Harder.

As chatbots and agents grow more powerful and ubiquitous, recognizing the moments when they go rogue can be tricky

"Chad Olson was confused when his Gemini artificial-intelligence chatbot told him he had a family reunion planning session marked on his calendar."

Agency in the Age of AI; Time, April 14, 2026

 John Palfrey , Time; Agency in the Age of AI

"OpenAI’s recent acquisition of OpenClaw, an open-source, autonomous AI agent designed to run locally on a user’s computer, is a sign that AI agents are quickly being given more responsibilities and more access—from emails to bank accounts, a decision with unintended consequences, including deleted inboxes and Amazon Web Services outages. Peter Steinberger, the founder of OpenClaw, said he wants to “build an agent that even my mum can use.” But there is a difference between using technology to improve efficiency and giving technology agency that humans should hold. 

These developments prompt hard questions, particularly for young people who are seeking agency in their personal and professional lives. Does it make sense to train to be an actuary if AI is supposed to be good at predicting unknown outcomes based on data? Is it worth the cost today to train to be a lawyer or an accountant or pursue higher education at all when all the answers are supposedly at our fingertips? Put another way, what does agency look like in an era dominated by the spread of AI?"

Nobody is governing AI; Quartz, April 8, 2026

Jackie Snow, Quartz ; Nobody is governing AI

Artificial intelligence is advancing faster than lawmakers can regulate it, while global AI governance fragments in real time

"Artificial intelligence is now making hiring decisions, tutoring children, optimizing power grids, and targeting weapons systems. The rules governing any of that are, almost everywhere, either nonexistent, stalled in committee, or under active attack.

In the United States, the federal government has spent three years producing executive orders, frameworks, and guidelines, none of which have become law. States that tried to fill the gap have been threatened with funding cuts and lawsuits. In Europe, the most ambitious AI legislation in the world is being delayed or softened before most of it has even taken effect. The technology, meanwhile, has not paused for any of this."

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman addresses Molotov cocktail attack on his home and AI backlash; Los Angeles Times, April 13, 2026

 Queenie Wong , Los Angeles Times; OpenAI CEO Sam Altman addresses Molotov cocktail attack on his home and AI backlash

"Hours after a Molotov cocktail was thrown at his San Francisco home, OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman addressed the criticism surrounding artificial intelligence that appears to have been the impetus for the attack. 

In a lengthy blog post, Altman shared a family photo of his husband and child, stating he hopes it might convince people not to repeat the attack despite their opinions on him.

The San Francisco Police Department arrested a 20-year-old man in connection with the Friday morning attack but did not publicly comment on the motivation. Altman and his company, the maker of ChatGPT, have been at the center of a heated debate about whether AI will change the world for better or worse."

Is AI the greatest art heist in history?; The Guardian, April 12, 2026

 Molly Crabapple, The Guardian; Is AI the greatest art heist in history? 

New technologies of reproduction are plundering the art world – and getting away with it

"In 2026, its easy to see why generative AI is bad. The internet has nicknamed its excretions “slop”. The CEOs of AI companies prance about on stage like supervillains, bragging that their products will eliminate vast swathes of work. Generative AI requires sacrificing the world’s water to feed its hideous data centres. Around the globe, chatbots induce schizophrenic delusions and urge teens to kill themselves – all while turning users brains to mush.

Who could have predicted this? Artists, that’s who...

When tech boosters want to demonise resistance, they invoke the luddites. By their telling, the luddites were primitive idiots, who smashed machines they were too stupid to understand. History though, tells a different story. As recounted by Brian Merchant’s sublime work Blood in the Machine, luddites were skilled artisans, fighting for their way of life against the “satanic mills” – textile sweatshops powered by child semi-slaves. Forbidden from unionising, luddites smashed machines as a protest tactic. And they did not lose to the inevitable march of progress. They lost to physical force. The government called in troops, and the luddites were either executed or shipped to penal colonies in Australia.

Artists too are fighting for a way of life. And if we are too disorganised to triumph, that will be everyone’s loss. AI companies’ inappropriate scraping may have started with the work of illustrators like me, but it has grown to encompass everything else. It extends to the billions of dollars that these companies squander each year, to the carbon they burn, to the rare minerals in their chips, to the land on which their data centres sit, to culture, education, sanity and our very imaginations. In return for the entirety of the human and non-human world, the tech lords can only offer us dystopia. Their fantasy future contains neither meaningful work nor real communities, just robots chattering to each other, leaving nothing for us."

The most 'ethical' AI company might also be the web's biggest freeloader; Business Insider, April 12, 2026

 Alistair Barr, Business Insider ; The most 'ethical' AI company might also be the web's biggest freeloader

"Cloudflare's latest data offers one of the clearest snapshots yet of how AI companies consume the web, and how little they give back.

The company, which powers roughly 20% of the internet, tracks how AI bots crawl websites versus how often those platforms send users back through referrals. The resulting "crawl-to-refer" ratio is a simple yet telling metric: how much value is extracted compared to returned.

The early April 2026 figures are stark. Anthropic is the worst by a wide margin, with a ratio of 8,800 to 1. That means its bots crawl webpages 8,800 times for every referral sent...

Anthropic's position is particularly striking given its reputation for being "ethical." That reputation has made it a preferred choice among some users who want to support more responsible AI development. This data highlights a different dimension of ethics — how companies interact with the broader web ecosystem that provides information for AI model outputs."

How AI is getting better at finding security holes; NPR, April 11, 2026

Huo Jingnan, NPR; How AI is getting better at finding security holes

"In the past few months, AI models have gone from producing hallucinations to becoming effective at finding security flaws in software, according to developers who maintain widely used cyber infrastructure. Those pieces of software, among other things, power operating systems and transfer data for things connected to the internet.

While these new capabilities can help developers make software more secure, they can also be weaponized by hackers and nation states to steal information and money or disrupt critical services.

The latest development of AI's cyber capability came on Tuesday, when AI lab Anthropic announced it had developed a powerful new model the company believes could "reshape cybersecurity." It said that its latest model, Mythos Preview, was able to find "high-severity vulnerabilities, including some in every major operating system and web browser." Not only that, the model was better at coming up with ways to exploit the vulnerabilities it found, which means malicious actors can more effectively achieve their goals.

For now, the company is limiting the access to the model to around 50 select companies and organizations "in an effort to secure the world's most critical software." They're calling the collaboration Project Glasswing, naming it after a butterfly species with transparent wings.

Anthropic says the risk for misuse is so high that it has no plans to release this particular model to the general public, according to the announcement, but it will release other related models. "Our eventual goal is to enable our users to safely deploy Mythos-class models at scale," the company wrote."

OpenAI Backs Bill That Would Limit Liability for AI-Enabled Mass Deaths or Financial Disasters; Wired, April 9, 2026

 MAXWELL ZEFF , Wired; OpenAI Backs Bill That Would Limit Liability for AI-Enabled Mass Deaths or Financial Disasters

The ChatGPT-maker testified in favor of an Illinois bill that would limit when AI labs can be held liable—even in cases where their products cause “critical harm.”

"OPENAI IS THROWING its support behind an Illinois state bill that would shield AI labs from liability in cases where AI models are used to cause serious societal harms, such as death or serious injury of 100 or more people or at least $1 billion in property damage."

Claude Mythos Is Everyone’s Problem; The Atlantic, April 9, 2026

 Matteo Wong , The Atlantic; Claude Mythos Is Everyone’s Problem

What happens when AI can hack everything?

"These companies can or could soon have the capability to launch major cyberattacks, conduct mass surveillance, influence military operations, cause huge swings in financial and labor markets, and reorient global supply chains. In theory, nothing governs these companies other than their own morals and their investors. They are developing the power to upend nations and economies. These are the AI superpowers."

Who owns ideas in the AI age?; Fortune, April 8, 2026

Francesca Cassidy , Fortune; Who owns ideas in the AI age?; David Shelley, CEO of Hachette’s U.K. and U.S. operations, on taking on Big Tech, defending copyright, and why the future of human creativity is at stake.

"Can you ever really own an idea?"

Meta debuts new AI model, attempting to catch Google, OpenAI after spending billions; CNBC, April 8, 2026

Jonathan Vanian, CNBC; Meta debuts new AI model, attempting to catch Google, OpenAI after spending billions

"Meta is debuting its first major artificial intelligence model since the costly hiring of Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang nine months ago, as the Facebook parent aims to carve out a niche in a market that’s being dominated by OpenAI, Anthropic and Google.

Dubbed Muse Spark and originally codenamed Avocado, the AI model announced Wednesday is the first from the company’s new Muse series developed by Meta Superintelligence Labs, the AI unit that Wang oversees. Wang joined Meta in June as part of the company’s $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI, where he was CEO."

US music publishers suing Anthropic make their case against AI 'fair use'; Reuters, March 24, 2026

 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?"

Anthropic Suddenly Cares Intensely About Intellectual Property After Realizing With Horror That It Accidentally Leaked Claude’s Source Code; Futurism, April 3, 2026

 Frank Landymore, Futurism; Anthropic Suddenly Cares Intensely About Intellectual Property After Realizing With Horror That It Accidentally Leaked Claude’s Source Code

"The AI industry largely acts as if it’s above lowly copyright laws — unless, of course, those laws happen to be protecting its own interests.

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."

Claude's Constitution; Anthropic, January 21, 2026

 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."

OpenAI Buys Streaming Show ‘TBPN,’ Aiming to Change Narrative on A.I.; The New York Times, April 2, 2026

 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."

Copyright Law in 2025: Courts begin to draw lines around AI training, piracy, and market harm; Reuters, March 16, 2026

Edward D. Lanquist and Benjamin West Janke , Reuters; Copyright Law in 2025: Courts begin to draw lines around AI training, piracy, and market harm

"In 2025, U.S. courts issued the first substantive, merits-stage decisions addressing whether the use of copyrighted works to train generative artificial intelligence systems constitutes "fair use." Although these rulings do not settle all open questions — and in some respects highlight emerging judicial disagreements — they represent a significant inflection point in copyright law's response to large language models, image generators, and other foundation models.

Taken together, these cases establish early guideposts for AI developers, publishers, media companies, and enterprises deploying generative AI systems. Below, we summarize the most important copyright ​decisions and pending cases shaping the law in 2025...

Conclusion and recommendations

The ​2025 decisions reflect cautious but meaningful progress in defining how copyright law applies to generative AI. Courts are increasingly receptive to fair use arguments for training on lawfully acquired data, deeply skeptical of speculative market-harm claims, and uniformly intolerant of piracy. At the same time, cases involving direct competition, news content, and human likeness may test the limits of these early rulings."