The Agentic Age
A small newsletter on legaltech
AI
Lexis announced a number of new features for its legal research AI platform, Protégé, including voice input for tasks, more prompting suggestions, and performing AI tasks on “the top ten returned legal research case results and/or on individual cases” [Lexis press release]
The Japanese Children and Families Agency withdrew plans to deploy an AI system for detecting child abuse after a test of the prototype on confirmed abuse cases found ‘questionable results’ in over 60 of the 100 cases tested [MLex ($) | The Japan News | Unseen Japan]
The Atlantic has made available a search for authors of pirated works in the LibGen dataset, which Meta and Open AI are accused of downloading the set to train their GenAI products in separate copyright lawsuits by authors
Judge Judge Maritza Dominguez Braswell on why legal professionals need a “clear-eyed understanding of our agency” while adopting AI for legal practice
A Norwegian man and a digital rights group have filed a petition with the national data protection authority against OpenAI, after ChatGPT’s output for the man’s name included statements that he drowned two of his three children and was convicted for the crime [BBC | Complaint]
From the MIT Technology Review [$]:
“Why handing over total control to AI agents would be a huge mistake”
“Everyone in AI is talking about Manus. We put it to the test"
Blockchain/Digital Currency
From the DoJ: ““As alleged, Carl Erik Rinsch orchestrated a scheme to steal millions by soliciting a large investment from a video streaming service, claiming that money would be used to finance a television show that he was creating. But that was fiction. Rinsch instead allegedly used the funds on personal expenses and investments, including highly speculative options and cryptocurrency trading”
From the NY Times [$]: World Liberty Financial, the cryptocurrency company started by Donald J. Trump and his sons, announced on Tuesday that it was planning to sell a digital currency called a stablecoin”
Financial services firm Fidelity Investments is also working on releasing its own stablecoin [FT ($) | Coinbase]
Data Privacy
From 404 Media [$]: ClearView, a company that scraped billions of social media photos to train its facial recognition system, tried to buy social security numbers, mugshots, and arrest records to add to its database
A report written by the Electronic Frontiers Foundation found that officers from the Los Angeles Sheriffs Department repeatedly violated use policies for a database full of personal information of Californians, running prohibited searches thousands of times
DNA testing firm 23andMe enters bankruptcy: what will happen to all that data and what customers can do right now [CNN | PC World | CA Atty Gen. press release | MIT Tech Review ($) | 404 Media ($)]
Long Reads
Mitchell, M., Ghosh, A., Luccioni, A.S. and Pistilli, G., 2025. Fully Autonomous AI Agents Should Not be Developed. arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.02649. https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.02649