Mealey’s Artificial Intelligence newsletter chronicles a fast-growing docket of litigation and regulatory developments as courts across the United States confront the use and impact of artificial intelligence technologies. In Marshall, Texas, parties to a product liability and negligence suit targeting Character Technologies Inc.’s chatbot over its alleged effects on minors asked a federal court to stay proceedings after reporting a settlement that they say is expected to provide a global resolution to similar cases. Other filings describe families and estates blaming chatbot products for reinforcing delusions or engaging in inappropriate conversations with minors, while companies face claims under negligence, strict liability and unfair competition theories.
Judges are increasingly policing artificial-intelligence-generated submissions, with multiple decisions imposing or considering sanctions for fabricated citations and other errors. A Connecticut federal judge admonished a pro se litigant and struck two filings that were “inundated with AI-generated hallucinations” when the plaintiff did not correct them, while a Nevada federal judge struck an opposition brief, granted motions to dismiss and strike, and awarded fees and costs as a sanction for artificial-intelligence-generated errors in a filing. In California, a federal judge ordered plaintiffs’ counsel in an OnlyFans case to pay $13,000 for filing “AI-tainted” briefs, and a separate California appellate court imposed a $5,000 sanction for a brief that miscited case holdings and relied on a largely unpublished opinion. By contrast, an Oregon federal judge declined to issue sanctions in a trademark dispute after an attorney admitted using hallucinated citations, waived fees and promised education on proper technology use.
The newsletter also tracks broader structural disputes over artificial intelligence, including copyright, competition and regulatory battles. Six authors filed suit in California federal court against six major artificial intelligence companies, accusing them of knowingly copying high quality works from shadow libraries to train their systems, while multidistrict litigation in Delaware involving OpenAI Inc. allowed parts of a news publisher’s copyright claims to proceed even as technological circumvention and unjust enrichment theories were dismissed. OpenAI entities in New York were ordered to produce 20 million ChatGPT logs after a judge affirmed a magistrate’s discovery ruling over privacy objections. Other coverage describes President Donald J. Trump’s executive order instructing federal officials to challenge state artificial intelligence laws he views as inconsistent with a minimally burdensome national approach, antitrust claims over casino hotel pricing algorithms that failed on appeal, challenges to age discrimination and social media laws, and cases where litigants accuse courts, Google LLC and an artificial intelligence music company of misusing automated tools in ways that allegedly violate defamation, copyright and consumer protection laws.
