Business

Commentary: In two new court cases, judges find that AI does not have human intelligence

Published

3 months ago

March 7, 2026

Commentary: In two new court cases, judges find that AI does not have human intelligence

It’s becoming clearer with every passing day that the only people making a serious effort to come to grips with the implications of artificial intelligence for society aren’t legislators, or business leaders, or AI promoters themselves. They’re judges.

Indeed, in recent weeks, judges in two federal cases have drawn a line that seems to have eluded many others contemplating AI. The cases relate to copyright law and attorney-client privilege.

In both cases, the judges have effectively declared that AI bots are not human. They don’t have rights reserved for people, and their outputs don’t deserve to be treated as though they come from human intelligence or have any special high-tech standing.

Must invention remain exclusively human, or can autonomous computational systems genuinely originate ideas?

— Artist and computer scientist Stephen Thaler

There’s more to those cases than that. Both cases, including one that got as far as the Supreme Court, underscore the determination of AI promoters and uses to infiltrate the new technology deeper into society.

Start with the more recent case. On Monday, the Supreme Court declined to take up a lawsuit in which artist and computer scientist Stephen Thaler tried to copyright an artwork that he acknowledged had been created by an AI bot of his own invention. That left in place a ruling last year by the District of Columbia Court of Appeals, which held that art created by non-humans can’t be copyrighted.

The case revolved around a 2012 painting titled “A Recent Entrance to Paradise,” depicting train tracks running under a bridge and disappearing into vegetation. Thaler wrote in his application for a copyright that the “author” of the work was his “Creativity Machine,” an AI tool, and that the work was “created autonomously by machine.”

The appellate ruling didn’t engage in artistic criticism, but the work’s artificial origin might be manifest to the discerning eye — its landscape is busy yet indistinct, sort of a melange of green and purple, and the framing doesn’t have any artistic logic — the eye doesn’t know what it’s supposed to be following. But Thaler says it’s the AI bot’s creation and wasn’t generated in response to any user prompt.

In any event, for Judge Patricia A. Millett, who wrote the opinion for a unanimous three-judge panel, the case wasn’t a close one. She cited longstanding regulations of the Copyright Office requiring that “for a work to be copyrightable, it must owe its origin to a human being.”

Millett noted that Thaler hadn’t bothered to conceal the non-human origin of “A Recent Entrance,” acknowledging in court papers that the painting “lacks human authorship.” She rejected Thaler’s argument, as had the federal trial judge who first heard the case, that the Copyright Office’s insistence that the author of a work must be human was unconstitutional. The Supreme Court evidently agreed.

Thaler told me he didn’t see the Supreme Court’s turndown as a “legal defeat.” In a LinkedIn post about the case, he wrote that the decision “represents a philosophical milestone — one that exposes how deeply our intellectual property system struggles to confront autonomous machine creativity.”

As that suggests, Thaler believes we shouldn’t distinguish how we view human creations from machine outputs. “Intelligence, creativity, and invention are not limited to human products,” he told me by email. Autonomous computational systems such as his AI program, he said, “can generate these functions independently.”

Millett’s ruling actually opened the door to admitting AI into the copyright world — but only when it’s used as a tool by a human author. What set Thaler’s case apart from those, she wrote, was his insistence that his AI bot was the “sole author of the work” (emphasis hers), “and it is undeniably a machine, not a human being.”

That brings us to the second case, which involved the question of whether an AI bot’s work should be protected under attorney-client privilege. Federal Judge Jed S. Rakoff of New York ruled, concisely, “The answer is no.”

As I’ve written in the past, Rakoff is one of our most percipient jurists about the impact of new technologies on the law. In his occasional essays for the New York Review of Books, he’s examined how a secret AI algorithm has skewed the sentencing of criminal defendants (especially Black defendants), how cryptocurrency advocates have made a tangle of existing laws on fraud, and how the misuse of cognitive neuroscience has resulted in convictions based on false memories.

In other words, Rakoff isn’t a judge you should try snowing with technological flapdoodle.

The case involved one Bradley Heppner, who was indicted by a federal grand jury for allegedly looting $150 million from a financial services company he chaired. Heppner pleaded innocent and was released on $25-million bail. The case is pending.

According to a ruling Rakoff issued on Feb. 17, the issue before him concerned exchanges that Heppner had with Claude, the chatbot developed by the AI firm Anthropic, written versions of which were seized by the FBI when it executed a search warrant of Heppner’s property.

Knowing that an indictment was in the offing, Heppner had consulted Claude for help on a defense strategy. His lawyers asserted that those exchanges, which were set forth in written memos, were tantamount to consultations with Heppner’s lawyers; therefore, his lawyers said, they were confidential according to attorney-client privilege and couldn’t be used against Heppner in court. (They also cited the related attorney work product doctrine, which grants confidentiality to lawyers’ notes and other similar material.)

That was a nontrivial point. Heppner had given Claude information he had learned from his lawyers, and shared Claude’s responses with his lawyers.

Rakoff made short work of this argument. First, he ruled, the AI documents weren’t communications between Heppner and his attorneys, since Claude isn’t an attorney. All such privileges, he noted, “require, among other things, ‘a trusting human relationship,’” say between a client and a licensed professional subject to ethical rules and duties.

“No such relationship exists, or could exist, between an AI user and a platform such as Claude,” Rakoff observed.

Second, he wrote, the exchanges between Heppner and Claude weren’t confidential. In its terms of use, Anthropic claims the right to collect both a user’s queries and Claude’s responses, use them to “train” Claude, and disclose them to others.

Finally, he wasn’t asking Claude for legal advice, but for information he could pass on to his own lawyers, or not. Indeed, when prosecutors tested Claude by asking whether it could give legal advice, the bot advised them to “consult with a qualified attorney.”

In his ruling, Rakoff did make an effort to address the broader questions judges face in dealing with AI. “Only three years after its release,” he wrote, “one prominent AI platform is being used by more than 800 million people worldwide every week. Yet the implications of AI for the law are only beginning to be explored.”

He concluded that “generative artificial intelligence “presents a new frontier in the ongoing dialogue between technology and the law….But AI’s novelty does not mean that its use is not subject to longstanding legal principles, such as those governing the attorney-client privilege and the work product doctrine.”

In this case and elsewhere, Rakoff has shown a superb grasp of technology issues. In his 2021 essay about the AI algorithm capable of sending people to jail, he put his finger on the factor that makes the very term “artificial intelligence” a misnomer.

The term, he wrote, tends to “conceal the importance of the human designer….It is the designer who determines what kinds of data will be input into the system and from what sources they will be drawn. It is the designer who determines what weights will be given to different inputs and how the program will adjust to them. And it is the designer who determines how all this will be applied to whatever the algorithm is meant to analyze.”

He’s right. That why judges have had so much trouble determining whether the AI engineers feeding information into chatbots to make it seem like they’re “creative” and even “sentient” are infringing the copyrights of the original creators of that information, or creating something new.

The problem is that they’re asking the wrong question. Everything an AI bot spews out is, at more than a fundamental level, the product of human creativity. The AI bots are machines, and portraying them as though they’re thinking creatures like artists or attorneys doesn’t change that, and shouldn’t.

Business

Read Nick Bilton’s Letter to Scott Pelley

Published

8 hours ago

June 3, 2026

Press Room

Read Nick Bilton’s Letter to Scott Pelley

Dear Mr. Pelley:

I meant what I said in my letter last week to the 60 Minutes team: joining 60 Minutes is the honor of my career and I am grateful to be working alongside the people who have contributed to the most important television journalism brand this country has ever produced. While I’m new to 60 Minutes, I’ve devoted my career to investigative journalism and storytelling. I started this job excited to collaborate and to benefit from the wisdom and experience of the 60 Minutes veterans, with you among them. For that reason, one of the first things I did in my new role was call you to talk and invite you to dinner. It is a profound disappointment that you rejected that overture and chose ambush instead. Yesterday, you hijacked my first meeting with staff to disparage me, my qualifications, and my intentions with remarkable incivility and contempt. I welcome a diversity of viewpoints and respectful debate among the team, but this was nothing of the sort. Yesterday’s performative display of hostility enacted in front of the staff instead of in a civil, private conversation-demonstrated that you have no interest in contributing to the future success of the show, or approaching my new tenure with a mind open to collaboration and progress. I am here to deliver first-in-class news programming, not to make headlines about newsroom drama. I am eager to work alongside those who share this goal.

Despite yesterday’s misconduct, I had hoped that in sitting down with you today we could find a path forward together. You made clear that you are not interested in such a path.

Your antipathy to the future of the show has come through loud and clear. And I have heard you. I therefore write on behalf of CBS News, Inc. (“CBS”) to inform you that your employment with CBS is terminated for cause effective immediately. Enclosed is your formal termination letter.

Sincerely,

Nick Bilton

Executive Producer, 60 Minutes

Business

Aspiration co-founder sentenced to 14 years for fraud

Published

9 hours ago

June 2, 2026

Press Room

Aspiration co-founder sentenced to 14 years for fraud

The co-founder of Aspiration, Joseph Sanberg, was sentenced to 14 years in prison on Monday after defrauding investors and lenders of over $248 million.

The startup, an eco-friendly digital banking company boasting fossil fuel-free investments, carbon offsets for gas purchases, and a debit card with cash-back benefits for shopping at clean companies, was founded by Sanberg and Andrei Cherny. Cherny left the company in 2022 and has not been charged.

Sanberg, an Orange County native, pleaded guilty to wire fraud in October after being arrested in March last year. Aspiration subsequently filed for bankruptcy and liquidated all of its assets by July.

Sanberg and venture capitalist Ibrahim AlHusseini, who also faces charges, together forged a series of bank statements in order to obtain loans. From 2020 to 2021, the pair forged AlHusseini’s bank statements to show millions of dollars in assets in order to obtain millions of dollars from lenders.

Additionally, they forged a letter from their audit committee stating that $250 million in funds were available, when in reality Aspiration had less than $1 million. The amount of loans defrauded exceeded $248 million.

In 2021, Sanberg artificially inflated Aspiration’s 2021 revenue by $44 million by recruiting 27 fake customers to sign letters of intent pledging tens of thousands of dollars per month for tree planting services. Sanberg himself funded the contracts and used the inflated revenue numbers to obtain more loans.

The charges sparked an NBA investigation into salary cap allegations due to Aspiration’s connections with Clippers owner Steve Ballmer.

Ballmer personally invested $60 million in Aspiration, all of which was lost. He is now the target of a civil lawsuit alleging his participation in the scheme. Ballmer denies the allegations.

The team announced a $300-million sponsorship deal with Aspiration, and Clippers player Kawhi Leonard signed a four-year, $28-million marketing contract with the company, which reportedly performed no duties. The issue has raised concerns about how players are circumventing the NBA’s salary cap.

The team lost the $300-million sponsorship deal and an additional $20 million paid for carbon offset purchases.

Business

Monterey Park takes landmark vote on banning data centers

Published

19 hours ago

June 2, 2026

Press Room

Monterey Park takes landmark vote on banning data centers

Residents in the city of Monterey Park will be the first in the nation to vote on a permanent ban on data centers Tuesday.

If approved, Measure NDC would prohibit data centers within the city limits and could only be overturned by another vote.

Yard signs saying “No Data Center” in English and Chinese with images of dragons line sidewalks in the San Gabriel Valley city.

As a wave of data center opposition sweeps the country, numerous towns and counties across the U.S. have instituted temporary moratoria and other restrictions on the facilities. But only a handful have instituted indefinite bans, and just four other towns have sent related matters to the ballot.

Supporters are hoping the vote will set a precedent for the rest of the region, where residents are fighting proposals in Vernon and City of Industry.

“This is about as permanent a ban as we can get,” said Steven Kung, co-founder of the group No Data Center Monterey Park. “Winning Measure NDC would send a huge message to the rest of the San Gabriel Valley about how residents don’t want data centers.”

The ballot measure emerged from the fight against a 247,000-square-foot center proposed in 2024 by the Australian-owned investment firm HMC StratCap for a residential area in Monterey Park.

The facility would have sat less than 500 feet away from the nearest home and used three times the electricity of the 60,000-person, predominantly Asian American city.

While the developer touted the potential for jobs and tax revenue, residents expressed concerns about noise and air pollution, rising electricity rates and a potential to lower property values.

The company pulled its plans in late March following public outcry and a March 4 city council vote to extend a temporary data center moratorium and place a ban on Tuesday’s ballot.

In a letter to the city council, HMC StratCap said it would pursue a different use for the land and would not engage in a ballot measure fight.

The city council later banned data centers indefinitely, the first in California to do so, said Mayor Elizabeth Yang. But she’s still been out campaigning for the measure with all four other council members.

“If a council puts in an ordinance, a future council can reverse it too,” said Yang. “With the ballot measure, unbanning it is a lot harder because you need the entire city to vote on it.”

The measure proposes the ban “to protect air quality, drinking water resources, and public health” and “prevent impacts to electricity and water rates.”

While California places third in the country for existing data centers with about 300 facilities, it hasn’t been a hot spot in the recent AI-driven data center boom. High electricity rates, expensive land and regulatory hurdles mean that fewer, and smaller, facilities are currently planned than in Virginia, Texas, Georgia, Illinois or Arizona.

“Most of California’s data centers are small by today’s standards,” said Shaolei Ren, an engineering professor at UC Riverside who studies how to reduce the environmental impacts of data centers. “Ten years ago, they would be medium-sized, but the power demand for new AI data centers has increased a lot.”

The average operating data center demands 45 megawatts, according to the Washington Post, while the average planned one would draw 430 MW. The one proposed for Monterey Park would have required about 50 MW at peak demand.

As proposals crop up in SoCal, they’re met with fierce opposition. Montebello, El Monte and Baldwin Park have all enacted temporary moratoria, and Alhambra recently banned data centers as part of a zoning code update. City of Industry, Vernon, City of Commerce and Santa Fe Springs are moving in the other direction, trying to court developers and streamline data center approvals. Community groups are fighting that.

Outside the San Gabriel Valley, residents of Coachella and Imperial County are showing up in droves to protest local proposals.

Matthew Shaw, a volunteer with the Coalition for Responsible Data Center Development, who recently published a report on opposition to AI data centers, said a vote to ban them in Monterey Park “would lead to copycats, partially because so many groups are just opposed to any data center development at all.”

While there is no formal opposition to Measure NDC, some building trades like Ironworker Local 433 supported the Monterey Park data center when it was still live before city council. Those in the data center industry are lamenting the state of public opinion.

“These are multi-billion-dollar assets that are built by multi-trillion-dollar companies. These things will get done,” said Mehdi Paryavi, chairman of the International Data Center Authority. “My biggest problem is that our industry does not invest enough in community engagement.”

Paryavi said towns that seek to limit data centers are missing out on thousands of jobs generated by data center construction, operations and customers, as well as faster artificial intelligence speeds and better performance.

Kung said local community organizers are “looking at the empirical evidence” and seeing a ban as a win.

“We’ve never seen a city that embraces a data center and is like, ‘Look how our quality of life has increased, look how all the revenue has gone into citywide improvements,’” he said. “That just doesn’t exist.”