AI

• A witness on the stand in a UK court case was found to have been receiving coaching on his testimony via his smart glasses [LegalFutures UK | BBC | 404 Media ($)]

• The LA Superior Court is launching a pilot program that will give judges accessed to an AI system called Learned Hand, to “help them summarize motions and draft rulings in civil court” [LA Times ($) | Press Release]

• An AI-generated avatar with the image and voice of Val Kilmer will be used in a film where the deceased actor was cast in a role but unable to film due to his medical condition; the actor’s children have approved this use

• From the Wall Street Journal [$]: “In January, OpenAI’s handpicked council of advisers on well-being and AI met with the company’s representatives for an update about a controversial new feature called “adult mode … Then OpenAI dropped a bombshell: Despite the concerns, it was forging ahead with its erotica plans. When they assembled for the January meeting, council members were unanimous—and furious. They warned that AI-powered erotica could foster unhealthy emotional dependence on ChatGPT for users and that minors could find ways to access sex chats, according to people familiar with the matter.”

• A new survey of English-speaking American teens found that over half of them had used or received explicit pictures created by nudification apps, over a third had non-consensual images made of themm and nearly a third had non-consensual images distributed to others [Courthouse News | PLOS One]

• Related: Three teens in Tennessee are suing x.AI for the creation and distribution of non-consensual intimate imagery that they claim was facilitated by x.AI’s licensing of GenAI tools to entities who then used it to create deepfakes of the teens [NPR | Docket | Complaint]

• The Senate sergeant-at-arms CIO has approved the usage of Google’s Gemini chat, OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot by Senate aides [NY Times ($) | 404 Media ($) | FedScoop | PC Mag]

• Roy Strom, a columnist for Bloomberg Law, has found that use of ChatGPT and other GenAI, seems to be fueling a ‘surge’ in lawsuits by self-represented litigants [Bloomberg Law ($) | Fisher Phillips blog | Seyforth Shaw blog]

• The Delaware Court of Chancery has ordered the reinstatement of a game developer after the CEO of a gaming publisher was found to have used ChatGPT to create and implement a scheme to avoid paying out a $250 million bonus [404 Media ($) | Kotaku | Opinion]

• Encyclopedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster are suing OpenAI for copyright infringement and trademark dilution in New York federal court [Reuters ($) | Yahoo! Finance | Docket | Complaint]

Fabrication Follies

• Whiting v. City of Athens, TN et al. [The Volokh Conspiracy | LawSites | Docket | Sanctioned Counsel Order]

• Payne vs. State (Georgia Supreme Court) [FOX5 News | Oral Argument | X/Twitter thread - Andrew Fleischman]

Blockchain/Digital Currency

• Chase Bank is being sued in a purported class action by victims of a cryptocurrency Ponzi scheme, the plaintiffs claiming that the bank actively ignored red flags by the company/people that fraudulent transfers of funds were occurring [Bloomberg Law ($) | Docket | Complaint]

• A cryptocurrency firm that sold tokens that allowed foreign buyers to own “fractional shares” of rental housing in Detroit, MI and other locales appears to be collapsing, with tenants in increasingly dangerous and unhabitable homes (and angry investors) [Wired ($) | Outlier]

Miscellaneous

• From Law.com: “California’s state bar alleged in a new court filing Wednesday that the vendor hired to administer the botched February 2025 bar exam hid troubling data and internal concerns about its own technical ability to provide the biannual lawyer-licensing test” [First Amended Complaint]

Long Reads

• Lermen, S., Paleka, D., Swanson, J., et al., Large-scale online deanonymization with LLMs (2026) arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.16800