Insights

On April 3, 2025, the United States Department of Justice’ Antitrust Division hosted a forum on “Big-Tech Censorship” in which key Trump Administration Officials announced their desire to reform, or entirely overhaul, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. In March 2025, we wrote about the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) inquiry into “tech censorship” and its associated request for public comments from those who “may have been harmed by technology platforms that limited their ability to share ideas or affiliations freely and openly.” That RFI remains open, and its deadline is May 21, 2025.

In what may be the first lawsuit of its kind, a student has sued Yale University alleging that he has been falsely accused of using artificial intelligence on a final exam. The complaint, filed in February, could have far-reaching implications for both the use of AI by students and issues related to academic honesty.

On February 20, 2025, the Federal Trade Commission launched an “inquiry” into “tech censorship” by calling for public comments from those who “may have been harmed by technology platforms that limited their ability to share ideas or affiliations freely and openly.” The deadline for comments is May 21, 2025.

Significant shifts in U.S. technology policy are taking shape at the start of the new administration. This is especially true in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), where President Trump revoked President Biden’s Executive Order 14110, titled “Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence,” as part of his flurry of Day One executive actions. The administration is now moving quickly to put its own stamp on this area in an effort to strengthen U.S. AI leadership and competitiveness and outpace other nations, particularly the People’s Republic of China.

On February 4, 2025, California Assemblywoman Rebecca Bauer-Kahan introduced AB 412, titled the AI Copyright Transparency Act (the “Act”), which is aimed at increasing greater transparency when copyrighted materials are used as training data for Generative AI (“GenAI”) models and systems. If passed, the Act would require developers who use copyrighted materials as part of their training dataset to disclose this use to the copyright owners.

Artificial intelligence is now a mainstay in our daily lives. It’s in our phones and computers. It helps us draft emails and learn math. It recommends purchases and guides our online searches. It’s everywhere—and every sign suggests that it’s here to stay.

On Sunday, September 29, 2024, California Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed SB 1047, a bill to enact the Safe and Secure Innovation for Frontier Artificial Intelligence Models Act. Although the bill passed the California Assembly and Senate, it generated significant controversy and debate within the tech community. The Center for AI Safety, Elon Musk, the L.A. Times editorial board, and San Francisco-based AI startup Anthropic all supported the bill; while Meta, OpenAI, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi opposed it as hindering innovation.

A February 13, 2024 Federal Trade Commission blog post titled AI (and other) Companies: Quietly Changing Your Terms of Service Could Be Unfair or Deceptive follows previous posts promoting its larger initiative to oversee the growing use of AI. In this post, the FTC reminds companies developing AI products to be cautious whenever changing their privacy policies and to ensure that the changes are not made in unfair or deceptive ways.

On January 9, 2024, the Federal Trade Commission published a blog post titled AI Companies: Uphold Your Privacy and Confidentiality Commitments. In it, the FTC, as part of its larger initiative to oversee the use of AI, reminds companies to abide by the privacy commitments they have made, no matter where they made them, and to disclose all material facts. If they do not, they risk an enforcement action from the FTC. To avoid legal risk, companies must coordinate across departments about their privacy policy and privacy representations as part of developing AI models.

In March 2023, the White House published its National Strategy to Advance Privacy-Preserving Data Sharing and Analytics.  Buried in the report was a quiet, but notable, concern related to the possibility of deanonymizing a consumer due to “insufficient disassociability”.  See Report, pg. 6.  A new wave of class action lawsuits in California—already over three dozen at the time of writing—now seeks to turn a spotlight on these practices, claiming that companies are using “grey market” data to match user patterns with personal identifiable information (PII).

On July 25, 2023, the Senate Judiciary Committee held its fifth hearing this year on artificial intelligence (AI). This is the second hearing held by the Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law, and it highlighted the “bipartisan unanimity” in regulating AI technology.

Local Law 144, New York City’s law governing the use of automated employment decision tools (“AEDTs”), became effective on July 5th, approximately six months after its original effective date and following several rounds of hearings on its proposed and Final Rule.  Just days prior, the New York City Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (“DCWP”) released a set of Frequently Asked Questions (“FAQs”) to provide guidance for covered employers regarding some of the many open questions that have been raised throughout the months since its regulations were first issued.  While the FAQs provide some clarity, many questions remain.

On June 23, 2023, a coalition of companies, including venture capital firms like Kleiner Perkins, General Catalyst and Founders Fund, and start-up defense technology companies, published an open letter to the Department of Defense (DoD), addressed to Secretary Lloyd J. Austin, petitioning DoD to consider procurement reform to help “overcome barriers to innovation.”  The group asserts these barriers create “antiquated methods for developing requirements and selecting technologies that have drastically limited” DoD’s access to “the best commercial innovation.”  In particular, the coalition endorsed adopting four recommendations pulled from a report by The Atlantic Council, a non-partisan international affairs think tank.

On June 7, 2023, the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Intellectual Property hosted a hearing titled “Artificial Intelligence and Intellectual Property – Part I: Patents, Innovation, and Competition.” It’s clear the Judiciary Committee is going to play an active role in the debate on how to regulate artificial intelligence (AI), with many more hearings to come, as this hearing came shortly after the Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law held a hearing on “Oversight of A.I.: Rules for Artificial Intelligence.”

On May 22, 2023, the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (“DCWP”) held a roundtable on Local Law 144, New York City’s law regulating the use of Automated Employment Decision Tools (“AEDT”), which will go into effect on July 5.  The roundtable followed the “Final Rule” for the New York AEDT law and clarified several open questions that the Final Rule had left unanswered, including the applicability of the law, the scope of data requirements for the bias audit, and the notice requirement.

On May 16, 2023, the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law held a hearing titled “Oversight of A.I.: Rules for Artificial Intelligence.” This hearing is the first in a series intended to provide a forum for industry leaders to discuss and provide an understanding of the implications of A.I. with an eye toward facilitating the development of appropriate guidelines and regulations.

Today, the New York City Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (“DCWP”) announced the “Final Rule” for the New York AEDT law (Local Law 144), and stated that the enforcement date is moved back from April 15, 2023, to July 5, 2023.

On March 2, 2023, the Biden Administration released the 35-page National Cybersecurity Strategy (the “Strategy”) with a goal “to secure the full benefits of a safe and secure digital ecosystem for all Americans.”

On February 17, 2023, the Illinois Supreme Court ruled 4-3 that violations of the Biometric Information Privacy Act (“BIPA”) (the country’s first biometric privacy legislation) accrue for each incident of capture or dissemination of biometric information, and not only once for each data subject. Cothron v. White Castle Systems found based on the plain language of the statute that violations for collecting or disclosing biometric information occur at every scan or transaction. Cothron v. White Castle Sys., 2023 IL 128004. The court reached this conclusion while admitting the “absurd” implications, including that the ruling could result in damages of $17 billion. Id. at ¶ 40.