Posts Tagged: "AI"

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Technology Engagement Center (C_TEC) today released its fourth annual report, titled “Empowering Small Business: The Impact of Technology on U.S. Small Business,” analyzing the important role of technology in small business operations, the unprecedented adoption rates of artificial intelligence (AI), and growing concerns about regulatory compliance. The report surveyed 3,870 U.S. small businesses with fewer than 250 employees between June 6 and June 26, 2025, highlighting how emerging technologies are reshaping America’s entrepreneurial sector.

U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California Judge William Alsup on Monday denied Anthropic’s motion to stay proceedings in Bartz et al. v. Anthropic PBC. Anthropic had sought to pause the case while pursuing appellate review of two rulings, one on fair use and the other on class certification. The order maintains the trial date set for December 1, 2025, and says the case proceedings must continue.

Last week, reports surfaced that spokespeople from the European Commission had confirmed the official withdrawal of legislative draft proposals that would have increased the European Union’s (EU) regulatory oversight over both standard-essential patent (SEP) licensing and civil liability of artificial intelligence (AI) products and services. While the decision to abandon these proposals was first made public this February, the EU Commission’s official withdrawal underscores ongoing tensions between the tech lobby and consumer advocates in the AI sector.

The Trump Administration on Wednesday released a plan for keeping the United States competitive in the race to number one with respect to artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. Titled “Winning the AI Race: America’s AI Action Plan,” the key policies would remove many of the restrictions on AI companies proposed by the Biden Administration’s AI plan, which was scrapped soon after Trump took office.

Senators Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) on Monday, July 21, introduced the AI Accountability and Personal Data Protection Act, which would chiefly bar artificial intelligence (AI) companies from using copyrighted works to train their generative AI tools without authors’ permission. The bill was announced less than a week after Hawley held a hearing of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism in which he called generative AI companies’ use of copyrighted works to train their chatbots and other large language models (LLMs) “the largest IP theft in American history.”

On Wednesday, July 16, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism held a hearing titled “Too Big to Prosecute?: Examining the AI Industry’s Mass Ingestion of Copyrighted Works for AI Training.” Subcommittee Chair Josh Hawley (R-MO) called generative AI companies’ use of copyrighted works to train their chatbots and other large language models (LLMs) “the largest IP theft in American history” and rejected the suggestion that the courts should determine the path forward.

I began my conversation with Wen Xie by giving her an open mic opportunity to share her thoughts on the state of the industry and she said: “You asked me just now before we started filming, should we be afraid of AI. And my answer is there’s no point in being afraid because it’s coming… AI is coming in every profession, every technology. And we shouldn’t resist it when it comes to patent drafting or patent prosecution.”

As the U.S. Senate disbanded from its 24-hour “vote-a-rama” debating amendments to President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” earlier today, one major provision that would have impacted the regulation of artificial intelligence has been scrapped. The AI modernization provision of the original version of the bill would have banned state and local governments from regulating AI for 10 years if they wanted access to funds aimed at improving AI infrastructure. Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) initially joined a compromise amendment with Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) that would have narrowed the scope of the provision and lowered the moratorium to five years, but later withdrew her support for that amendment and introduced her proposal to strike the provision in its entirety along with Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA), which passed by a vote of 99-1.

On Monday, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California issued a mixed  order on fair use as it relates to generative AI, in part likening the training of Large Language Models (LLMs) to the process of human learning, in a case brought against generative AI tool Anthropic by a group of authors. The lawsuit was filed by journalists and book authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson in August 2024 against Anthropic on behalf of a class of plaintiffs, alleging widespread copyright infringement of “hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books.” The suit challenged only the inputs of the LLMs, not the outputs.

On Wednesday, predictive analytics firm Recentive filed a combined petition  for panel rehearing and rehearing en banc with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit challenging that court’s invalidation of Recentive’s machine learning patent claims this April. As Recentive argues, the Federal Circuit’s decision to eliminate all patent protection for novel machine learning applications using established models conflicts with the U.S. Supreme Court’s patent-eligibility standard under 35 U.S.C. § 101 and chills U.S. innovation an incredibly important area of emerging technology.

The topic this week is quantum computers. It is quite a niche topic and finding people who actually know what they’re talking about is not particularly easy, but this is an enormously important topic that we should all know something about because for Artificial Intelligence (AI) to achieve all its full potential, we are going to need much better and much faster computers. And whether it is ultimately quantum computing or whatever comes next, quantum computers are going to be at minimum a bridge to go from where we are right now to where most in the public already think we are in terms of AI sophistication. What are quantum computers and how do they operate? Why are quantum computers necessary for the evolution of AI? Why can’t ordinary computers do what we need to have done? What is the particular advantage of quantum computing versus classical computing power?

This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed I speak with Allison Gaul who serves as legal counsel for Boston Consulting Group. We begin our conversation with me asking about what she believes are the biggest legal issues in the IP world today. Gaul did identify several things that stay top of mind for her, with various issues relating to data front and center as the top issue. The second area identified by Gaul was open source, and how many of the AI companies promoting “open source” are really not truly open source because often the model, weights and/or training data are not made available, which makes it seem like these companies are racing to gain market share and ultimately “doing a little bit of a switcheroo.” The third and final thing that Gaul identifies as being constantly top of mind is the overall speed of AI development.

This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed we explore whether artificial intelligence (AI) technology has progressed to the point where it has already achieved consciousness. In a nutshell, the answer is our panel of technologists do not believe AI is very close to achieving consciousness, but that it is indeed possible for AI to reach the point of consciousness, and to even reach the point of self-reflection, which would pose an existential threat to humanity.

On the same day that the U.S. Copyright Office (USCO) officially released part three of its study into the effects of artificial intelligence (AI) on copyright law, the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) announced its own 436-page report on AI and copyright. The EUIPO report was compiled by a research team of the University of Turin Law School and the Nexa Center for Internet & Society from the Polytechnic of Turin. It was based on “desk research as well as interviews from key stakeholder groups including, copyright holders, AI companies, technology solution providers as well as public organisations,” according to the EUIPO.

Late last week—one day after the Trump Administration fired Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden and the day before it reportedly fired Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter—the U.S. Copyright Office released a pre-publication edition of the third part in the agency’s series of reports exploring issues in copyright law in light of evolving artificial intelligence (AI) technology.