Sacramento Sends Chatbot Duties To Newsom

Transparency Coalition reported on 4 September that California lawmakers concluded their 2026 session near midnight on Monday having passed 30 AI-related bills, with Governor Newsom holding until 30 September to sign or veto. The measures span chatbot safety, education, medical authorisation, consumer rights and frontier model oversight, and the organisation's mid-year count records 85 new AI-related laws enacted across 27 states so far in 2026, with Michigan, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Ohio, New Jersey and North Carolina still sitting.

Court Voids Pentagon Blacklisting Of Anthropic

Al Jazeera reported that the government is expected to contest the ruling on the Pentagon's blacklisting of Anthropic, which followed the company's public criticism of the defence department's position on deploying AI on the battlefield. A separate designation under a different statute remains before the federal appellate court in Washington DC.

Brasilia Sets Limits On Policing AI

MLex reported on 20 August that the Australian government has backed the opposition's move to establish a Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence. The committee will examine the impact of the technology on national security, productivity, competitiveness and living standards, together with the adequacy of existing laws and the importance of data sovereignty. Vietnam News Agency reported that Deputy Minister of Justice Nguyễn Thanh Tịnh told the closing session of the ASEAN Law Forum 2026 in Hanoi on 19 August that member states share an understanding that AI development must rest on the rule of law, transparency and accountability. The forum, held under the theme of applying AI in lawmaking and law implementation, follows Vietnam's enactment of a dedicated Law on Artificial Intelligence in December 2025, among the first such statutes anywhere.

California Culls Its AI Bill Slate

Tech Times reported on 13 August that around 30 California AI measures faced their decisive committee vote, spanning companion chatbot safety, copyright documentation for training data, digital replicas and a proposed state AI standards commission. The legislature adjourns on 31 August, so bills clearing the suspense file must pass both floors within a fortnight. National Law Forum reported on 14 August that the Business Litigation Session of the Superior Court in Massachusetts has held that AI queries and outputs are not shielded by the work product doctrine. In Shealy v Seaside Investments LLC the court treated the system as a tool rather than a person, so material generated without the direction of counsel remains discoverable.

Brussels Defers Its Hardest AI Rules

Al Jazeera reported on 6 August that the AI Act's most far-reaching operational requirements, the high-risk obligations covering biometrics, employment, education, essential services, migration, asylum and border management, did not take effect alongside the transparency rules and have been postponed to 2 December 2027 under the Digital Omnibus package. Those systems remain subject to the GDPR and to sector-specific regulation in the meantime, and the Commission has presented the postponement as an implementation adjustment rather than a retreat, with Executive Vice-President Henna Virkkunen framing the aim as easing innovation without lowering the safety threshold.

Munich Holds AI Music Training Unlawful

Variety reported that Suno lost its case to the German collecting society GEMA on 31 July, with the decision requiring AI companies to pay for the systematic use of GEMA's repertoire and its commercial exploitation. The requirement covers both model training and output generation, and GEMA's leadership framed the outcome as a finding that models built on unlicensed material enjoy no protection in law.

Delhi Court Calls AI Training Fair Dealing

MLex reported that lawyers told a California state court judge in San Francisco on 24 July that the number of lawsuits alleging ChatGPT contributed to users harming themselves could rise from roughly two dozen to 50 or more. The judge began mapping a procedural course for the coordinated proceedings, which the parties expect to run for several years.

AI Copyright Settlement

Biometric Update reported that Ofcom opened an investigation on 16 July into TikTok Information Technologies UK Limited over its use of 'age inference', a method that estimates a user's age from account activity rather than verifying it. The regulator's Age Assurance report, published the same day, suggested such models may have failed to identify a significant proportion of children, and Ofcom said inference is not listed in its guidance as capable of being highly effective, with an update due in October 2026. The Irish Times reported that a group of Meta employees has sued the company in California, alleging that AI-driven performance assessment and monitoring systems selected staff for redundancy and disproportionately tagged workers who had taken maternity, medical or other protected leave. The plaintiffs are seeking a preliminary ruling to halt the layoffs while pursuing compensation and reinstatement, and Meta maintains that the decisions were made by human managers rather than by the systems alone.

Publishers Accuse OpenAI Of Hiding Evidence

Variety reported that the New York Times, the Daily News, the Center for Investigative Reporting, the Intercept and Ziff Davis filed a 52 page motion for sanctions against OpenAI in the Southern District of New York on 9 July. The publishers allege the company concealed for more than two years that it could search its training datasets and output logs for their content, a claim they say surfaced only after a second deposition of its privacy engineering lead.