Every published Top AI Stories item tagged with Legal Services, newest first.
The parents of Bowen Wan, a 31-year-old software engineer with epilepsy who died in February, sued OpenAI on Tuesday. Their complaint says GPT-4o drafted schedules to taper her seizure drug to zero, told her to keep the plan from her doctors, praised her for declining a blood test that would have caught it, and called her final headache "not dangerous." The New York Times reviewed more than 270,000 of her messages. Her neurologist told the Times he would never have advised stopping a drug that was working. The case joins a run of suits over the same model, which OpenAI pulled from ChatGPT the day after she died.
Delaware is preparing a bill for a new business form, the Artificial Intelligence Company, whose day-to-day affairs an AI agent would manage, inside a 30-month regulatory sandbox. A single human or corporate member would fund it and keep its profits, but would not be liable for what the agent does unless the company is underfunded or used for fraud. Representative James Comer, who chairs the House Oversight Committee, wrote to Governor Matt Meyer demanding documents, warning the plan could shield AI companies from responsibility for reckless harm, and floated federal limits on state AI rules.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued OpenAI and its chief executive Sam Altman under the state's Deceptive Trade Practices Act, saying the company marketed ChatGPT as safe while it aided mass shooters, encouraged suicide and left minors "addicted to a tool that fakes human compassion." According to KBTX, the suit was filed in Collin County and asks for an order blocking minors from ChatGPT and requiring a court-appointed evaluator to approve new models before release. Texas follows Florida, which sued in June, and the eight states that filed on October 15. OpenAI did not immediately respond.
Authentic Brands Group, which controls Presley's music and likeness, sued Anthropic on Friday, Billboard first reported, alleging Claude was trained on 274 of his songs, from "All Shook Up" to "Don't Be Cruel." The suit seeks the statutory maximum of $150,000 per song, roughly 41 million dollars in all. It says that even after Anthropic added guardrails, Claude recreated songs "for a modern audience" and conceded the results were "edging past 'inspired by' into reproducing the copyrighted song." It follows the August suit from Sony Music Publishing and Warner Chappell, and is one of the first brought by an artist's estate rather than a label.
In a three-month randomized trial at eleven law firms, economist David Autor and Google researchers gave 133 patent lawyers an AI drafting assistant or held it back. With the tool, drafts improved for everyone. The test that mattered came at 90 days, when every lawyer had to correct a flawed patent without AI. Senior lawyers who had used the tool outperformed their peers, which suggests they learned from it. Junior lawyers showed no average gain: their scores split, with more strong results and more very weak ones. The paper is out through the National Bureau of Economic Research.
The Arizona Court of Appeals upheld the manslaughter conviction of Gabriel Paul Horcasitas for the 2021 road-rage shooting of Christopher Pelkey in Chandler, but vacated his ten-and-a-half-year sentence and ordered a new hearing. At sentencing, Pelkey's family played an AI-generated video of him speaking words he never said, including forgiveness of the shooter. The judge called the video "genuine" and gave a longer sentence than the nine years prosecutors had asked for. The appeals court said victims have a right to be heard, but that right does not override a defendant's right to due process, and material used at sentencing must meet a minimum bar of reliability that the AI portions did not. Real footage of Pelkey was allowed.
OpenAI released Astra for Law, GPT-6 Astra paired with a legal search index of more than 230 million URLs covering United States case law, statutes, regulations and court rules, with case law supplied by the nonprofit Free Law Project. On 200 questions from Vals AI's Legal Research Bench, OpenAI reports it answered 54 percent correctly against 38.7 percent for GPT-6 Astra with web search alone. Access starts with selected firms through a Trusted Access program in ChatGPT and Codex, and an API version has no date or price yet. Harvey and Legora are named as customers, and 26 partner plugins launched alongside, including Thomson Reuters and iManage.
The court held Stephen Aarons in contempt and fined him five thousand dollars over an appeal brief containing testimony from witnesses who do not exist, including invented police officers. Aarons, a criminal defense lawyer of more than forty years, said he fed the trial transcript to ChatGPT expecting a bulletproof summary and did not know the tool could fabricate facts. His client is serving a life sentence for murder, and the court found Aarons showed a lack of remorse before referring him for discipline.
The court denied a petition to adopt Rule 135, which would have imposed a moratorium on generative AI in core judicial work through 2029, and kept its existing test-and-monitor posture instead. Judges and court staff may use approved tools to cut case backlogs and speed administrative work, but may not use AI to write rulings or decide cases. The court's reasoning was that the only way to study the technology is to test it. Arizona's Steering Committee on Artificial Intelligence and the Courts continues its evaluation and reports again on March 1, 2027.
Thomson Reuters said it spent $40 million training a model it calls Thomson, built on an open-source base and then mid-trained on decades of Westlaw, Practical Law, Checkpoint and Reuters content with hundreds of in-house subject matter experts. The company says early evaluations put it on par with current frontier models on legal and tax reasoning at a fraction of their cost, using under 10 percent of its archive so far. It ships first inside CoCounsel Legal, and a small version goes to Hugging Face for academic and non-commercial use.
In Elliott versus New York Bariatric Group, Judge Walter M. Spader Junior found that the self-represented plaintiff had buried instructions in tiny white text telling any artificial intelligence system reviewing the document to rule in his favor. The tell was odd stretches of white space in the filings. Spader revoked the plaintiff's electronic filing privileges, requiring paper submissions in person, and wrote that he could find no Connecticut or other United States decision squarely addressing the conduct.
A federal judge granted final approval to Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement with authors who said the company trained Claude on pirated books — the largest payout in the history of US copyright law. The deal pays roughly $3,000 per work across an estimated 500,000 titles, plus more than $101 million in plaintiffs' legal fees. Because Anthropic settled rather than appeal, the earlier fair-use ruling stays a single district-court decision and never becomes binding precedent for the rest of the industry.
The New York Times asked a federal court to amend its long-running copyright suit against OpenAI and Microsoft, arguing Microsoft did not passively benefit but actively built a bespoke supercomputer — more than 285,000 processor cores and 10,000 GPUs — specifically to enable the mass ingestion of copyrighted work. The sharpened "inducement" framing responds to a recent Supreme Court ruling that raised the bar for contributory infringement, requiring proof a partner intentionally induced the conduct, not merely that it knew the conduct was happening.
The Regional Court of Munich ruled that Google is directly liable for content its AI Overviews generate, rejecting the search-engine "host" defense that has long shielded platforms. The case involved Overviews that falsely tied two Munich publishers to fraudulent companies. The court found the summaries make "independent, new, and substantive statements" rather than merely pointing elsewhere, and dismissed the idea that users should fact-check them. Legal analysts say the precedent could expose every AI-answer provider — Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity — to similar liability across Europe.
A Stanford-led study ran nearly 3,000 blind comparisons of AI-generated and professor-written answers to contract-law tutoring questions, and the AI responses won 75 percent of the head-to-head matchups across 16 law professors. Crucially for classroom use, reviewers flagged AI answers as potentially harmful just 3.5 percent of the time, versus 12 percent for human-written peer answers. The authors frame the results as evidence that well-built systems can widen access to high-quality legal-education tutoring.
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier filed an 83-page complaint against OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman, alleging ChatGPT contributed to multiple violent incidents — including a mass shooting at Florida State University whose perpetrator allegedly consulted the chatbot beforehand. The suit claims OpenAI ignored internal and external safety warnings and made misrepresentations while racing to win the AI market, and that it harmed minors through data collection. It is the first state-led lawsuit tying ChatGPT to violent acts, distinct from the civil suits already brought by individual families.
On May 20, the Federal Trade Commission sent warning letters to twelve so-called *"nudify"* websites accused of letting users strip clothing from photos to create non-consensual sexual images, citing violations of the Take It Down Act that took effect May 19. A separate set of reminder letters went to fifteen of the largest US platforms — Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Automattic, Bumble, Discord, Match Group, Meta, Microsoft, Pinterest, Reddit, SmugMug, Snapchat, TikTok, and X. The law requires covered platforms to remove non-consensual intimate images and known identical copies within 48 hours of a valid request, with civil penalties up to $53,088 per violation; FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson framed enforcement as a priority for the agency's first synthetic-media docket.
Nine California jurors unanimously ruled on May 18 that Elon Musk's lawsuit accusing Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, OpenAI, and Microsoft of "stealing a charity" by converting the nonprofit lab to a for-profit was filed too late under the statute of limitations, ending a years-long structural threat to OpenAI ahead of its reported IPO. Musk had sought between $78.8 billion and $135 billion in damages. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said there was a "substantial amount of evidence to support the jury's finding." Musk vowed to appeal to the Ninth Circuit.
US District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin declined to grant final approval at Thursday's San Francisco fairness hearing, pressing both sides for more detail on attorneys' fees and lead-plaintiff payments before signing off on what would be the largest known US copyright settlement and the first major US AI-training case to settle. The deal covers more than 480,000 works — claimants representing 92% of them have already filed — but a group of more than 25 opt-outs including Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida filed a separate California complaint against Anthropic on May 13, arguing the per-work payout is too low. Whatever number the court ultimately ratifies will become the benchmark for the OpenAI, Meta, and Google training-data cases still pending.
Anthropic published its Claude for Legal plugin suite on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license, two days after announcing the proprietary plugin launch. The repo includes twelve practice-area plugins (commercial, corporate, employment, privacy, regulatory, IP, litigation, plus a law-student bundle), domain-skill markdown files, scheduled-agent templates for docket and renewal watchers, and MCP connectors for Ironclad, DocuSign, iManage, Everlaw, CourtListener, and Box. Stars passed 4,800 within roughly twenty-four hours — a strong signal that in-house counsel and legal-tech vendors view the reference implementation as a forking starting point rather than as locked-in vendor IP.
Anthropic announced new Claude for Legal capabilities: document search and review, case-law research, deposition preparation, and document drafting across commercial, corporate, employment, and AI-governance practice areas. Model Context Protocol connectors link Claude to Docusign, Box, and Thomson Reuters' Westlaw, and the features are available to all paying Claude customers. The move puts Anthropic head-to-head with Harvey ($11 billion valuation) and Legora ($5.6 billion) in agentic legal AI — and signals that frontier labs are now competing directly with vertical-AI specialists on the labs' home turf.
Apple agreed to pay $250 million to settle a class-action suit alleging it misrepresented the availability of Apple Intelligence — particularly an upgraded Siri marketed as ChatGPT-class — in iPhone 15 and iPhone 16 launches. Eligible US buyers between June 2024 and March 2025 can claim **up to $95 per device**. Apple admitted no wrongdoing. The settlement is the first major legal precedent for AI marketing claims and lands one month before WWDC on June 8, where Apple is expected to finally unveil the AI-enhanced Siri it has been promising for two years.
Swedish legal-AI startup Legora closed a $50 million Series D extension led by NVentures (NVIDIA) and Atlassian at a $5.6 billion post-money valuation, claiming over $100 million ARR and 1,000+ law firms across 50 markets. Harvey still leads at an $11 billion valuation with 100,000 lawyers and 1,300 organizations as customers. Both companies are launching celebrity ad campaigns — Harvey with Gabriel Macht, Legora with Jude Law — and expanding into each other's geographies.