Insights

San Francisco – January 15, 2025: Crowell & Moring counsel Anna Z. Saber was appointed to the board of directors of the Iranian American Bar Association’s (IABA) Northern California Chapter. The IABA is the only national association of Iranian-American judges, attorneys, legal scholars, and law students in the U.S. with over 1,500 members and eight chapters nationwide.

Washington — Dec. 3, 2024: Crowell & Moring represented Microsoft and LF Projects in seizing 240 fraudulent websites linked to an Egypt-based criminal organization. On November 21, 2024, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia unsealed a temporary restraining order against Abanoub Nady (known online as “MRxC0DER”) and John Doe Defendants (collectively the “Fake ONNX Defendants”), who developed, sold, and implemented “do it yourself” phishing kits under the predominant brand names “ONNX” and “Caffeine,” among several others. In selling these kits under the ONNX name, the cybercriminals misappropriated and misused the “ONNX” trademark, which is owned by LF Projects. LF Projects uses the ONNX name and logo in connection with the Open Neural Network Exchange, a platform that enables interoperability between AI models throughout the tech industry. Numerous cybercriminal and online threat actors purchased these kits and used them in widespread phishing campaigns to bypass additional security measures and break into Microsoft customer accounts.

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.

On Wednesday, October 16, 2024, New York’s Department of Financial Services (DFS) announced new guidance aimed at identifying and providing a blueprint for protecting against AI-specific cybersecurity risks.  Motivated primarily by advancements in AI that substantially impact cybersecurity—including facilitating new ways to commit cybercrime—DFS’s guidance aims to specifically protect New York businesses but applies to all companies concerned with increasing their cybersecurity and managing risks posed by emerging technologies. The guidance addresses “most significant” AI-related threats to cybersecurity that organizations should consider when they are developing a cybersecurity program, internal protocols, or implementing cybersecurity controls—as well as recommendations for those cybersecurity programs.

On October 30, 2023, President Biden released an Executive Order (EO) on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence (AI).  This landmark EO seeks to advance the safe and secure development and deployment of AI by implementing a society-wide effort across government, the private sector, academia, and civil society to harness “AI for good,” while mitigating its substantial risks.

In 2024, Latin American countries ramped up their data protection laws, following the general trend seen in international privacy law outside of the European Union. While many countries in Latin America enacted measures in 2024, others scheduled their regulations to go into effect in early 2025, and still others continue to wrestle with the legislative process.