Federal prosecutors arrested two Volkswagen engineers in San Jose, California, charging them with insider trading. Michael Stamp and Marcus Plank, who work at VW’s US operations, allegedly purchased Rivian stock before the company publicly announced its multibillion-dollar joint venture with the electric vehicle manufacturer. Each faces one count of federal securities fraud.
A UK employment tribunal has decided that requiring a remote worker with anxiety, ADHD, and autism to keep her camera on during a video training session was discriminatory. Laura Tait, a home-based travel consultant for Holiday Extras, received compensation after the Croydon tribunal ruled the employer failed to provide reasonable adjustments for her conditions.
The European Commission has fined Google €890 million (£760 million) for violating competition laws within the Digital Markets Act. The firm is accused of prioritizing its own services, like shopping and hotel deals, over competitors' offerings in search results. Google must now treat third-party services appearing in its search results fairly and without discrimination.
Congress is rushing to pass several important health care bills before its August recess, focusing on issues like price transparency and the streamlining of prior authorization processes.
A federal judge has approved a $1.5 billion class action settlement between Anthropic and a group of authors who claimed the company trained its AI on their copyrighted books without permission. The settlement will provide approximately $3,000 to each author for every book alleged to have been unlawfully used. Representing the largest copyright recovery to date, the case highlights growing legal scrutiny over AI training data. The authors include Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, who initially filed the lawsuit.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced that the U.S. government is considering sanctions against Chinese AI companies for intellectual property theft. This move is part of a broader strategy initiated during the Trump administration aimed at curbing China's progress in artificial intelligence technology.
The discussion around banning Chinese-made open-weight large language models highlights the difficulties in commercializing AI technology amidst geopolitical tensions.
The Australian government is set to introduce stringent regulations on the use of AI in automated decision-making across government departments and agencies. This new national plan aims to ensure that AI applications prioritize fairness, accuracy, and transparency. It is expected to extend protections to consumers, workplace safety, and privacy as AI adoption grows rapidly alongside a surge in datacentre construction. Senior ministers are collaborating to embed safety and ethical standards into government AI processes. Additionally, the plan accompanies Labor's initiative to enforce a digital duty of care legislation.
In the latest Equity episode, we discuss the potential effects of Apple's lawsuit on OpenAI's emerging hardware initiatives and its plans to go public.
Certain aspects of the legal profession remain beyond the reach of AI, ensuring that some skills and roles will always require human expertise.
