Elizabeth Dias, The New York Times; Religious Scholars Met With Anthropic. What They Heard Stunned Them.
"The religious scholars had come to hear about technology’s next frontier. Now they were being confronted with a mind-bending existential question of almost unimaginable weight: What would it mean for humanity’s future if artificial intelligence systems possessed a consciousness that rivals our own?"
Jim VanderHei, Mike Allen, Axios; Behind the Curtain: AI's existential legal crisis
"No industry has ever documented its own foreseeable risks as loudly as AI.
Imagine a plaintiff's lawyer reading the public warnings of Sam Altman and Dario Amodei: They told the world it was dangerous. They told the world it was moving too fast. Then they unleashed it and sold it to your kid.
No industry has ever taken so much copyrighted work and left behind so much proof.
Imagine a plaintiff's lawyer reading OpenAI's own files to a jury: They trained on a pirated library. They renamed it to something blander. Then they deleted it when the headlines got hot...
The big picture: The fights are no longer theoretical. They're underway, in discovery and headed toward juries. Early verdicts and settlements capture the risk for the biggest players.
Isabella Kwai, The New York Times; Swedish Company Uses A.I. Likeness of Greta Garbo in Ad
"An ad for a Swedish manufacturing company released this week turned an A.I.-generated likeness of Ms. Garbo into a company spokeswoman."
, The New York Times; LIBRARIANS ON LIBRARIES
We spoke with dozens of librarians at the A.L.A. conference this summer in Chicago. They came from rural towns and major cities, elementary schools and universities, local branches and big government agencies.
These librarians want you to know that they don’t sit around reading all day. They want you to know about book bans and budget cuts, but also about career counseling and crafting groups and pop-up medical clinics.
They want you to worry, the way they worry, about artificial intelligence, looming legislation and harassment of their staff. But most of all, they want you to know what the library really is: a safe place for people to gather around books, ideas and one another.
Here’s what librarians had to say, in their own words."
Hugh Schofield, BBC; Pope warns against 'losing humanity' to AI machines
"Pope Leo XIV has issued a warning about the dangers of artificial intelligence (AI) at the start of his four-day visit to France.
The pontiff cautioned against "losing our humanity amid a paradise of machines" in wide-ranging remarks to Church and state officials at the Élysée Palace, following an hour of talks with President Emmanuel Macron.
Leo made a similar warning earlier this year when he spoke of the need for AI to be "disarmed" in the first major teaching document of his papacy.
In his May appeal, he mentioned the slave trade in relation to AI, suggesting that the world was in danger of normalising the exploitation of people once again."
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."
, 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."
"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."
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.
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."
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."
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."
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."
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."
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."
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."
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."
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."
