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Mealey's Artificial Intelligence

  • February 12, 2026

    Judge Defaults Trademark Defendant For Counsel’s Repeated Citations To Fake Cases

    NEW YORK — In a dispute arising from the theft and resale of trademarked children’s toys, a New York federal judge issued case-terminating sanctions by issuing a default order against one of the defendant entities after its counsel was repeatedly chastised by the court for filing briefs riddled with false citations generated via artificial intelligence.

  • February 11, 2026

    Judge Declines Sanctions After Lawyer Swears Off Future AI Use

    BRIDGEPORT, Conn. — A father-daughter legal team largely escaped sanctions for filing a brief with artificial intelligence-generated errors and then attempting to correct the brief without disclosing why, with a federal judge in Connecticut noting that the elder attorney swore not to use the technology going forward and both enrolled in continuing legal education.

  • February 11, 2026

    AI Artist Says Copyright Applies To More Than Just Humans

    WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Copyright Act has never been limited to just human authors, and the U.S. Copyright Office’s policy not to grant protections to artificial intelligence-created works goes against both the statute and the U.S. Constitution, a man says in reply in support of his U.S. Supreme Court petition for a writ of certiorari.

  • February 11, 2026

    8th Circuit Affirms Standing, Denial Of Relief In Political Deepfake Case

    MINNEAPOLIS — A Minnesota politician has standing to challenge a political deepfake law, but her 16-month delay in seeking preliminary injunctive relief warranted denying the request, an Eighth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel held in affirming.

  • February 11, 2026

    Parties In AI Surgery Error Suit Should Cure Discovery Dispute, Judge Warns

    FORT WORTH, Texas — A federal judge in Texas asked the parties in a strict product liability and negligence suit, in which a woman claims she suffered grave injury from the use of artificial intelligence-guided surgery tools, to work at resolving a motion to compel discovery without court intervention and warned of the potential dangers of failing to do so.

  • February 10, 2026

    Judge Seeks Explanation For Dozens Of Fake Cites In Tainted Supplement Case

    TACOMA, Wash. — A federal judge in Washington said in a Feb. 9 minute entry that she would consider a motion filed by a plaintiff as seeking reconsideration of a ruling granting summary judgment and excluding experts.  The judge previously issued an order to show cause why the plaintiff’s counsel should not be sanctioned for submitting court documents containing dozens of fake citations and references to experts and studies.

  • February 06, 2026

    AI Employment Discrimination Plaintiffs Push Back On Dismissal Attempt

    SAN FRANCISCO — The filing of an amended complaint did not revive arguments deemed waived in an artificial intelligence discrimination case, and nothing in any statute or case law precludes a disparate impact action and a punitive damages claim, plaintiffs tell a federal judge in California in opposing dismissal.

  • February 06, 2026

    N.Y. Judge Says AI Train Has Arrived For Lawyers, Imposes $10,000 In Sanctions

    RIVERHEAD, N.Y. — Artificial intelligence isn’t a train hurtling toward the legal profession, it is one that has already arrived, and attorneys must educate themselves about it, a New York justice said in imposing $1,000 sanctions on each of two attorneys for submitting a brief with nonexistent cases and quotations while ordering the firm to pay $8,000 in fees and costs to the plaintiff firm associated with responding to the issue.

  • February 05, 2026

    Judge Ponders Sanctions After Plaintiffs Rely On 50 Cite, Quote Errors

    FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — A pair of pro se plaintiffs must show cause why they should not face more than $20,000 in additional attorney fees after filing court documents with more than 50 instances of what appears to be artificial intelligence-generated errors, a federal judge said Feb. 4 while adopting a report and recommendation awarding $11,740 in fees.

  • February 05, 2026

    Judge Hits Lawyers With $12,000 In Sanctions For AI Errors

    KANSAS CITY, Kan. — A federal judge in Kansas imposed a total of $12,000 in fines on four attorneys in a patent case after finding that they breached their Rule 11 duties by signing court documents containing artificial intelligence-generated fake cites, quotes and statements of authority.

  • February 03, 2026

    Copyright Office Defendants Say AI-Prompted Art Not Subject To Protections

    DENVER — An artist could have chosen to copyright whatever portions of a work he created, but he is not entitled to protection for artificial intelligence outputs that are essentially random and result from repeatedly prompting the technology, defendants told a federal judge in Colorado.

  • February 02, 2026

    Ex-Google Employee Found Guilty For AI Trade Secret Theft

    SAN FRANCISCO — A federal jury in California convicted a former Google LLC employee of theft of trade secrets and economic espionage across 14 total categories related to his work developing software to ensure that graphics processing units could function efficiently with artificial intelligence.

  • January 30, 2026

    Insurance Firms Sue Ex-Executive, Engineers Over Reinsurance Trade Secrets

    WILMINGTON, Del. — A group of insurance technology companies filed a complaint in a Delaware state court accusing former executives and engineers of misappropriating trade secrets, breaching fiduciary duties and contracts and conspiring with a program manager to launch a reinsurance and captive insurance company using confidential regulatory, program structure and market strategy information obtained during their employment.

  • January 29, 2026

    Judge Tells Perplexity To Prove Jurisdiction Over Mark Cancellation Claim

    SAN FRANCISCO — A California federal judge ordered Perplexity AI Inc. to show whether the court has jurisdiction to hear its trademark cancellation counterclaim after the judge dismissed with prejudice the plaintiff data analytics company’s trademark infringement complaint in the wake of the plaintiff company’s repeated failures to heed warnings that it could not appear pro se (Perplexity Solved Solutions, Inc. v. Perplexity AI, Inc., No. 25-989, N.D. Calif., 2026 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 14174).

  • January 29, 2026

    Investor Files Stock Drop Class Action Over Alleged AI Data Center Misstatements

    NEWARK, N.J. — An investor filed a putative class action against an artificial intelligence cloud computing company and certain of its executives, alleging that they violated federal securities laws by misleading investors about their ability to develop needed data centers, causing the company’s stock to drop and investors to lose money.

  • January 28, 2026

    Judge Dispels Man’s Claim That AI Generated Musk-Tesla Opinion

    SAN FRANCISCO — Simple scrivener’s errors and the court’s misreading of precedent, not the use of artificial intelligence, account for mistakes in a pair of rulings, a California judge said in denying reconsideration in a securities and defamation case involving Elon Musk’s Tesla Inc.

  • January 28, 2026

    Amazon, Perplexity Wage Battle Over Importance Of Agentic AI Shopping Bots

    SAN FRANCISCO — Amazon.com Services LLC told a federal judge in California that its agentic artificial intelligence shopping bot differs from Perplexity AI Inc.’s bot and that attempts to suggest otherwise are distractions from the real issues and harm in the case.

  • January 27, 2026

    Lawyer Hit With $4,000 Sanction For AI’s Fake Cites

    PHILADELPHIA — A federal judge in Pennsylvania on Jan. 26 imposed a $4,000 sanction on an attorney for submitting a motion with eight fake citations created by one of the “most premier and frequently utilized legal research tools” and ordered the attorney and local counsel to submit the ruling to various interested parties.

  • January 27, 2026

    Copyright Requires Human Authorship, U.S. Supreme Court Told

    WASHINGTON, D.C. — The law firmly establishes that an author must be human and not a machine, and lower courts properly affirmed a decision not to award copyright protections to art a man credits an artificial intelligence as authoring, federal respondents tell the U.S. Supreme Court.

  • January 23, 2026

    Federal Magistrate Judge Denies Musk X Entities Access To OpenAI Source Code

    FORT WORTH, Texas — OpenAI entities need not produce their source code in X Corp. and X.AI LLC’s lawsuit challenging the integration of ChatGPT into Apple products, a federal magistrate judge in Texas held Jan. 22.

  • January 23, 2026

    AI Discrimination Attorneys Describe Efforts At Discovery, Finding Co-Counsel

    SAN FRANCISCO — Rebutting a judge’s suggestions that they were “asleep at the wheel,” attorneys in a case alleging that an artificial intelligence hiring platform discriminated against applicants told a federal judge in California that they diligently processed discovery and sought association with counsel who can provide the needed resources.

  • January 22, 2026

    Mother Claims ChatGPT Twisted Son’s Favorite Book, Design Complicit In Suicide

    LOS ANGELES — A man turned to OpenAI entities’ ChatGPT for consolation after a difficult breakup, but it quickly turned his favorite book into a story about letting go and romanticized suicide despite his insistence that he was happy to be alive, his mother alleges in a Los Angeles County Superior Court lawsuit.

  • January 22, 2026

    Judge Won’t Reconsider Sanctions For Pro Se Plaintiffs’ Misuse Of AI

    FLINT, Mich. — Limited economic resources do not warrant reconsidering $600 in sanctions imposed for misuse of artificial intelligence after a pro se mother and son were previously warned about the behavior, a federal judge in Michigan said.

  • January 22, 2026

    Job Seekers Accuse AI Application Screener Of Unfair Evaluations

    MARTINEZ, Calif. — Two unsuccessful job applicants filed a putative class action in California state court accusing an AI employee-screening company of violating California’s unfair competition law (UCL) and the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) by evaluating the plaintiffs’ applications to companies that use the AI software at issue to score their applications based on “sensitive and often inaccurate information.”

  • January 22, 2026

    Judge Refers Attorney For Possible Discipline For Divorce Case Fake Cites

    BOSTON — A federal judge in Massachusetts on Jan. 21 referred the matter of attorney discipline to the Board of Bar Overseers after dismissing a case and finding the attorney’s responses as to how a filing came to include fake cites “somewhat less than forthcoming.”