WORLD

Lawyers at leading artificial intelligence companies warned on Thursday that malicious actors could exploit the capabilities of open-source AI models, raising concerns about cybersecurity threats and the need for stronger safeguards.

Alex Iftimie, deputy general counsel at OpenAI, said the potential use of open-source models by ransomware groups, hostile nation-state actors and intelligence services was an urgent concern.

“That is a problem that will manifest in serious ways, likely over the next few months,” he said at an American Bar Association conference on national security law in Washington, DC.

Will Hudson, associate general counsel at Anthropic PBC, said the open-source nature of AI models made it significantly easier to remove their safeguards. If models without such protections were available to anyone, cyber-defenders should also have access to the most capable systems, he added.

“Certainly cyber-defenders should have access to the most capable models,” Hudson said.

The discussion comes as AI has assumed a prominent role in Washington, with the US midterm election season under way and government leaders grappling with how best to regulate and manage the technology.

Concerns about the potential threat AI poses to humanity intensified last month after an Anthropic researcher resigned, warning that Anthropic and OpenAI “are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives”.

Several executives who met US President Donald Trump last week pledged to introduce “robust internal controls” to monitor AI models during training and deployment.

Phil Carter, senior counsel at Alphabet Inc.'s Google, said at Thursday's conference that the government needed to invest in the infrastructure required to identify and address vulnerabilities in open-source systems.

“Without that, I think there’s just enormous latent vulnerability in the global information system,” he said.

Carter also called on Congress to develop a single, large appropriations measure to “supercharge the research enterprise” in the US.

Hudson said the largest AI laboratories should be required to test their systems for “catastrophic risk”. They should publish the results, he said, with an independent evaluator subsequently assessing their findings.

Democratic Party officials have filed a lawsuit seeking to prevent US President Donald Trump’s administration from spending public money on television advertisements that praise him, arguing that the campaign violates restrictions on the use of government funds for political propaganda.

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) filed the case in a federal court in Washington, alleging that the advertisements breach a statutory prohibition on using appropriated funds for “publicity or propaganda purposes”.

The advertisements, which began airing in late September, have triggered criticism from both Democrats and Republicans over the use of taxpayers’ money to promote the president.

A separate lawsuit was filed in New York on Wednesday by watchdog group Common Cause, a public employee union and a candidate for the Alabama state legislature. The plaintiffs are also seeking a court order to stop the advertisements, arguing that they amount to personal publicity and political propaganda rather than public-service announcements.

In a post on his Truth Social platform on Monday, Trump described the advertisements as “a positive promotion for our Great U.S.A.” but said they would no longer be financed by taxpayers. The White House subsequently said his political action committee, MAGA PAC, would fund the campaign.

However, the DNC said the advertisements continued to run after Trump’s announcement, prompting it to pursue legal action.

“With less than 30 days remaining before the midterm election and millions of public dollars apportioned to pay for propaganda ads still unspent, the DNC has no choice but to take action in defence of free and fair elections,” the lawsuit stated.

The advertisements were broadcast during football games as recently as Sunday, as well as during other television programmes. The New York Times reported that Trump had personally instructed the White House budget director to use taxpayer money to pay for the television spots, citing people familiar with the matter.

One advertisement features Trump declaring that “America will never be a communist country”, while a chorus repeats the words “love me”. Another combines images of Mount Rushmore with footage of the president describing the period as a “golden age of America”.

A more recent advertisement also features ousted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro. A source briefed on the matter told Reuters that the government-funded advertisements were expected to end this week.

The White House has said MAGA PAC will not reimburse taxpayers for advertisements that have already aired. The television spots conclude with a disclaimer stating that they were paid for by the US government.

Christa Pike, who was sentenced to death for a 1995 murder, awoke “angry and confused” in hospital this week and faces a long recovery after surviving Tennessee’s failed attempt to execute her, her lawyers said on Wednesday.

Pike, 50, was taken from the execution chamber to a Nashville hospital a week ago, unconscious and critically ill, with severe injuries to her arms after two injections of the barbiturate pentobarbital failed to kill her at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution.

As recently as Monday, her lawyers believed Pike was brain dead and that life support would be withdrawn the following day. Her failed execution was the second such incident in Tennessee this year, prompting renewed scrutiny of the state’s use of the death penalty.

“But on Tuesday, to the shock of everyone, including me, including her team and including the medical team, Christa woke up and began talking,” Randall Spivey, one of her lawyers, told reporters after a court hearing on Wednesday.

During the hearing, a judge ordered Tennessee officials to preserve syringes and other evidence from the failed execution.

“She is angry and confused about everything right now,” Spivey said. “She is very aware that the state tried to execute her.”

Governor Bill Lee has suspended all executions in Tennessee for the remainder of the year while investigators examine the failed executions of Pike and Tony Carruthers in May, when prison officials were unable to establish intravenous lines.

Pike remains seriously ill and shackled to her hospital bed, her lawyers said. She cannot swallow or eat and has pneumonia. Her hands and arms are “tremendously swollen”, leaving her unable to move them, and it remains unclear whether she will regain her mobility.

Although she continues to experience “cognitive confusion”, her lawyers said she has been speaking with people around her.

“She has wanted to know what’s happened, and she’s asked about several people,” Spivey said. “She’s asked about the victim’s family.”

Pike was sentenced to death for her role, as a teenager, in the torture and murder of her 19-year-old schoolmate, Colleen Slemmer, in 1995.

Her lawyers say she is the first person known to have survived a completed execution attempt in the United States. They argue that the attempt amounted to a violation of the US Constitution’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.

A Unique Case

Pike’s lawyers are continuing their legal action against state officials, seeking greater transparency over execution procedures in Tennessee and challenging the secrecy that typically surrounds them.

Earlier on Wednesday, Davidson County Chancery Court Judge I’Ashea Myles ordered Tennessee officials to preserve all evidence from the failed execution, including syringes, drug packaging and lot numbers, catheters, intravenous lines and gurney restraints.

Pike’s all-female execution team used at least seven needles during an ordeal that lasted more than two hours, her lawyers said. One needle was bent at a 90-degree angle when it was removed.

Myles largely sided with Pike’s lawyers at the end of Wednesday’s hearing, describing the litigation, which began in January as part of efforts to prevent the scheduled execution, as unusual because no one had expected Pike to survive. “This case is unique, to say the least,” Myles said.

She also ordered the state to preserve internal communications relating to the attempted execution, including incident reports, witness accounts and encrypted messages.

Myles has yet to rule on a request by Pike’s lawyers for the Tennessee Department of Correction to allow them to obtain any residual traces of the execution drugs for chemical analysis.

The Tennessee Department of Correction has opposed what it described as a “duplicative and unnecessary” preservation order, arguing that it is already legally required to preserve evidence and had already agreed to share most, if not all, of the material sought by Pike’s lawyers.

Tennessee and other US states have long struggled to obtain drugs used in executions. Major pharmaceutical companies generally do not supply them because of restrictions imposed by European countries on companies whose products are used in torture or executions.

Tennessee, like other states, has therefore turned to small, largely unregulated compounding pharmacies to produce limited batches of execution drugs, while promising to keep their identities confidential.

“Today’s hearing was about transparency, about why Christa, the courts, the media and the public should not simply take the state’s word about what happened last Wednesday,” Luke Ihnen, another lawyer for Pike, told reporters after the judge’s ruling.

He repeated the call for Governor Lee to commute Pike’s death sentence to life imprisonment and never attempt to execute her again. A spokesperson for Lee, who rejected a clemency appeal two days before the failed execution, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Pike’s lawyers had previously sought an alternative to lethal injection, arguing that her small veins and related medical conditions made her concerned that the execution could go wrong.

Florida has asked a state judge to order changes to Instagram and Facebook to better protect young users, pressing ahead with a lawsuit accusing Meta Platforms of harming teenagers after most states resolved similar claims through a sweeping settlement.

In a filing in a Pasco County court on Wednesday, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier asked for a temporary injunction requiring Meta to identify and remove users under the age of 14 from the platforms in the state, limit teenagers to two hours a day across its apps and disable features such as autoplay and infinite scrolling for them.

The filing seeks to have the changes implemented immediately and remain in place while the lawsuit proceeds.

A Meta spokesperson said that, following the company’s settlement with nearly every other state, Florida should focus on persuading other platforms to take action.

“The attorney general should be using taxpayer resources to get YouTube and TikTok to empower parents and protect teens in Florida. We regret that he has chosen instead to pursue a meritless preliminary injunction years into the litigation,” the spokesperson said.

Florida’s lawsuit against Meta, which accuses the company of knowingly designing its platforms to be addictive for young users and misleading consumers about their safety, was one of dozens of similar lawsuits filed by states across the country.

In August, Meta reached settlements with 48 other states and Washington, DC, agreeing to pay up to $18 billion and make changes to the way teenagers use its platforms.

Meta has said it works hard to keep teenagers safe on its platforms and denied wrongdoing in agreeing to settle. The total payout represents about three to four months of profit and roughly one month of revenue for the company.Uthmeier, a Republican, chose not to join the settlement and instead continued with Florida’s lawsuit.

Florida said in the filing that the settlement amounted to a “mere slap on the wrist” that would be viewed cynically as the cost of doing business and, in any event, would not prevent similar conduct in the future.

The measures sought by Uthmeier are more stringent than those Meta agreed to as part of the settlement. They would cut off teenagers’ access to messaging once their daily time limits are reached and prevent the company from showing them advertisements.

Uthmeier’s office argued that the changes Meta agreed to under the settlement demonstrate that the measures sought by Florida are technically and operationally possible.

A US federal judge has dismissed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Disney and filmmaker James Cameron, rejecting claims that the Avatar sequels copied elements of a science-fiction story created by a 3-D animator.

The case, brought by animator Eric Ryder, alleged that Cameron and Disney copied his original work, known as KRZ, in developing Avatar: The Way of Water and Avatar: Fire and Ash.

The ruling by the US District Court for the Central District of California gives Disney and Cameron a legal victory in the dispute over the blockbuster film franchise.

Ryder had argued that the two sequels contained similarities to his work that amounted to copyright infringement. The court, however, found that the alleged similarities were either based on material that predated Ryder's work, carried forward from the original Avatar film, or involved ideas that were not protected by copyright.

Cameron had developed a detailed treatment for the original Avatar film in 1995, before Ryder presented his KRZ project to Lightstorm Entertainment in 2000.

The court also noted that an earlier case had already found that the original Avatar was not substantially similar to Ryder's work. It therefore excluded elements carried forward from the first film when assessing the allegations concerning the sequels.

Among the similarities highlighted by Ryder was the depiction of underwater harvesting of organic material said to have life-extending properties. The judge found that the alleged similarities, when examined in context, were not sufficient to establish copyright infringement.

The court also rejected the argument that expert testimony or further discovery was required to determine whether the works were substantially similar. It said the remaining issues could be assessed without specialised knowledge because the works were intended for general audiences and dealt with readily understandable subject matter.

Ryder's copyright claim included allegations of direct, contributory and vicarious infringement. The court dismissed those claims, finding that secondary copyright liability could not stand without an underlying finding of direct infringement.

The judge also dismissed Ryder's related state-law claims without prejudice after declining to exercise supplemental jurisdiction over them. The court had previously allowed Ryder an opportunity to amend his complaint, but he chose to stand on his existing filing.

The lawsuit is Ryder v. Cameron, No. 2:25-cv-11854, in the US District Court for the Central District of California. Reuters identified Daniel Saunders of Kasowitz LLP as representing Ryder and Kelly Klaus of Munger Tolles & Olson as representing Disney.

A federal judge on Monday blocked efforts by the Trump administration to impose fines of up to $1.8 million on migrants who fail to leave the US after receiving final deportation orders.

US District Judge George O’Toole in Boston issued the ruling in a class-action lawsuit filed last year by two of the thousands of migrants who have been assessed civil penalties by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

O’Toole said the administration had imposed the fines unlawfully. Halting the policies related to the penalties was necessary, he said, because collecting the fines would likely drive the plaintiffs into insolvency.

“The plaintiffs live in an economically precarious position even without the imposition of the government’s exorbitant fines,” he wrote.

As recently as July, the department said it had issued more than 103,000 fines to migrants, amounting to about $84 billion in total, since President Donald Trump returned to the White House last year.

While Congress authorised civil penalties under the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, no administration sought to impose them until Trump’s first term.

Starting last year, Trump’s second administration began levying fines of $998 a day on migrants who failed to leave the US after receiving a deportation order. The fines have been imposed retroactively for up to five years, resulting in a maximum penalty of $1.8 million.

In July 2025, DHS and the US Department of Justice introduced a new process that they said would streamline the assessment of fines by eliminating a 30-day notice period and shortening the process for challenging penalties.

The plaintiffs, who also included the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, challenged that policy, as well as what they described as a practice by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a DHS agency, of issuing fines using boilerplate forms without independently determining whether an individual’s failure to depart was “willful” or “voluntary”.

O’Toole, an appointee of Democratic President Bill Clinton, sided with the plaintiffs, ruling that the fines were unlawful and violated the Administrative Procedure Act because the forms lacked specific allegations explaining why an individual’s conduct warranted a penalty.

He also found that the administration had failed to comply with rulemaking procedures when adopting its streamlined fine-imposition process because it had not given the public an opportunity to comment on the policy change beforehand.

A US judge on Thursday dismissed a federal case accusing a Jamaican national of illegally voting, ruling that the law criminalising noncitizen voting was unconstitutional and delivering a setback to the Trump administration’s campaign against alleged election fraud.

The ruling by Miami-based US District Judge David Leibowitz applies only to the case of Florida resident Chelsea Cox, who was charged in October 2025 with illegally voting in the 2020 election. It is not binding on judges in other cases.

The decision marks a setback for President Donald Trump’s administration on noncitizen voting, a cornerstone of its efforts to highlight alleged election fraud ahead of November’s midterm elections. Republicans are fighting to retain majorities in both houses of Congress.

The Justice Department has charged at least 60 people with noncitizen voting since Trump returned to office in January 2025.

Leibowitz, who was nominated by Democratic President Joe Biden, appears to be the first federal judge to find that the 1996 law violates the US Constitution.

Leibowitz wrote that under the Constitution, only states can determine voter qualifications, not Congress. Every state requires US citizenship to vote, and he said it was up to Florida, rather than the Department of Justice, to prosecute Cox for violating that requirement.

“Can the State of Florida prohibit and punish the exact conduct Defendant Cox allegedly engaged in here? This has already been decided elsewhere and is not addressed here: Florida can and does,” Leibowitz wrote.

Trump, who falsely claims that fraud cost him the 2020 election, has said stricter enforcement of citizenship requirements is necessary to protect election integrity. His critics say the administration’s highly publicised crackdown on noncitizen voting exaggerates a rare problem and could undermine confidence in election results.

Neither the White House nor the Justice Department immediately responded to requests for comment.

In a court filing, the Justice Department had argued that Congress, rather than the states, was best equipped to handle immigration and foreign affairs.

“Foreign interference in elections is clearly within the purview of Congress,” federal prosecutors wrote.

Other Defendants Have Challenged Law

Cox’s attorney, Bruce Udolf, welcomed the ruling. “This is a situation that cries out for discretion by government officials and they’d be well-advised to walk away from this without further reprisal against her,” he said.

Cox entered the United States as a tourist in 1999 and remained after her visa expired the following year, according to a government court filing. She used a fraudulent US Virgin Islands birth certificate to obtain a Florida driver’s licence and used those documents to register to vote in 2012.

Records show she voted in federal elections from 2012 to 2020, but only the 2020 election fell within the statute of limitations.

There are about 45 pending noncitizen voting cases around the country, and at least four other defendants have challenged the law on similar grounds. Judges in those cases may find Leibowitz’s reasoning persuasive, but they are not bound by his decision.

Trump has portrayed noncitizen voting as part of a broad Democratic Party conspiracy to dilute Republican power. But Cox was one of just 129 people charged with violating the law known as “voting by an alien”, according to a Reuters investigation published in July.

The investigation, published on July 19, found no defendant accused of conspiring to sway an election, supporting a candidate or taking payment for a vote.

The Reuters investigation also showed that most of those accused of noncitizen voting were lawful permanent residents who either registered by mistake or were encouraged to sign up to vote based on misguided advice from an election worker or government clerk.

Illegal voting is grounds for deportation and, as Reuters has reported, the Trump administration has been investigating noncitizen voting and deporting defendants, sometimes years after their criminal cases were closed.

Cox’s attorney Udolf said he hoped the government would not move to deport her, citing her declining health.

On July 16, Trump said without evidence that 278,000 noncitizens were registered to vote in California, Nevada, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Five days later, New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat, said about 400 noncitizens in her state had voted after a software error mistakenly registered about 6,600 people in 2023-24. The Justice Department has demanded their names, nationalities and addresses.

A federal judge has warned that law firms’ growing use of artificial intelligence could create risks for clients and hinder the training of junior lawyers, even as he declined to sanction attorneys over AI-generated errors in a court filing.

Manhattan-based US District Judge Arun Subramanian said in an order this week that the episode should serve as a “wake-up call” for lawyers, cautioning that AI-generated legal work must be carefully checked for accuracy.

“While clients may demand the use of AI to save money, there is a risk of adverse consequences when things go wrong,” Subramanian wrote. “For this reason, it might make sense to clients to think hard before requiring counsel to use AI for tasks such as the drafting of briefs.” The judge did not say the client in this case had asked its lawyers to use AI.

State and federal judges are increasingly weighing whether and how to sanction lawyers over misuse of AI as the technology becomes more widespread.

In the New York case, Subramanian questioned in an order last month whether the “unchecked” use of AI had led to citation errors in a copyright infringement case he was overseeing.

The judge this week declined to impose sanctions on the lawyers after Cynthia Arato, an attorney for defendant Foundation Media, apologised and said the errors stemmed from another lawyer at her firm who was responsible for preparing the initial draft and finalising it before it was filed.

Arato said in a declaration this week that the lawyer, who was not named, had acted “contrary to the firm’s policies and training” and that the failure to check AI-generated citations was “an isolated error and not any bad faith or intent to mislead or deceive the court”.

Foundation Media declined to comment. There was no indication in court filings that the company had directed its outside lawyers to use AI.

Arato said her firm, Shapiro Arato Bach, was implementing additional safeguards against AI misuse.

In a filin, Arato disclosed that the firm had used AI tools developed by technology company Harvey to help prepare the filing, which contained the improperly vetted citations.

Subramanian said in his order that the legal profession should “think about ways to ensure that junior lawyers are getting the training they need, even as reliance on these technological tools increases”. He suggested that firms could require initial drafts of briefs to be prepared without AI assistance.

“The use of AI may be unavoidable, but mentoring young lawyers is a joint responsibility that we all share,” Subramanian wrote.

The US Supreme Court begins its new nine-month term on Monday much as it ended its last one, confronted with more cases involving President Donald Trump's far-reaching policies and aggressive use of executive power that will test how far the justices will allow him to expand his authority.

The court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, wrapped up its last term in June after a period dominated by legal battles over Trump's exercise of presidential powers. The justices handed the Republican president several major victories, alongside a few significant defeats.

Given the array of new cases that the administration is preparing for review by the nation's highest court, the new term promises to feel familiar. The court has already agreed to hear disputes over two key policies underpinning Trump's hardline immigration agenda and drive for mass deportations — mandatory detention without a bond hearing and the rapid expulsion of deportees to countries other than their own.

The administration has also filed appeals defending Trump's ban on transgender people serving in the military, cuts to academic grants, efforts to install federal prosecutors and the suspension of asylum at the US-Mexico border. The court will decide whether to hear those cases in the weeks and months ahead.

Pushing Boundaries

In the Trump era, the work of the court continues to be defined by how it handles cases involving a president willing to move quickly and push the boundaries of executive power.

"The Supreme Court has consistently facilitated the Trump administration's efforts to radically transform the scope of presidential power in the United States," said Syracuse University College of Law professor Jenny Breen.

"Trump's losses have frequently been tied to concerns related to fears of economic destabilisation among some justices. ... But outside of that fairly limited universe of cases, losses for the president have been few and far between," Breen said, citing the court's rulings against Trump's sweeping global tariffs and his bid to fire a Federal Reserve governor.

Last term, the court also handed Trump defeats over his attempts to curtail birthright citizenship and send National Guard troops to the Chicago area.

Despite those losses, the court has repeatedly allowed Trump to pursue consequential policies — restricting immigration, targeting transgender people, cutting research grants and more — that lower courts had blocked or impeded, while legal challenges to their legality proceed.

In a landmark decision that overturned a 1935 precedent, the court allowed Trump to assert greater control over independent government regulators, significantly expanding presidential power.

Legal experts said the court is willing to endorse a strong executive branch, but has limits when Trump moves too far beyond the laws passed by Congress.

"In those rare instances when the Supreme Court has stood up to President Trump, it has been by enforcing federal laws," said Harvard Law School professor Daphna Renan, an expert in presidential power.

"By contrast, when the court has defied or invalidated federal laws that touch on the presidency ... it has emboldened Trump and enabled his own law-breaking," Renan said, citing Trump's victory over independent regulators as an example.

Not A Rubber Stamp, Not Resistance

"It's not a rubber stamp, and it's not the resistance," said Morgan Ratner, a lawyer who has argued numerous cases before the Supreme Court.

Ratner said the court is focusing strongly on maintaining the structural balance between the three branches of government — executive, legislative and judicial — set out by the US Constitution. How Trump fares at the Supreme Court will depend largely on that issue, Ratner said.

Presidential power over executive branch officials will "cut strongly in his favour", Ratner said. "But when we're talking about the president doing things that push closer to Congress's domain or that expand on narrow grants of statutory authority, that's going to cut against him."

Donald Verrilli, who served as US solicitor general under Democratic former President Barack Obama, said: "The court is asserting its independence from the president."

"It's doing so at a time in which there really is a pretty darn serious ... constitutional clash going on, in which the president is asserting an enormous amount of executive authority or trying to do so," Verrilli said during a recent panel discussion at Georgetown University.

Trump Lashes Out

Trump himself has not taken the defeats he has suffered lightly. He continues to criticise the justices for ruling against him in various cases.

He has recently focused his ire on Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, the three conservative justices he appointed during his first term in office, suggesting they are insufficiently loyal to him. Trump has said they are "merely a shell of their original selves" and that he regrets nominating them.

Their appointments to the court created its current conservative supermajority, which has steered it on a dramatic rightward course since 2020. The court has rolled back abortion rights, expanded gun and religious rights, rejected race-conscious admissions policies at colleges and universities, and limited the power of federal agencies, among other decisions.

The court, which chooses the cases it takes up for resolution, is expected to have more opportunities to define the scope of Trump's authority.

Among the issues on which the court may again side with Trump is a case testing the legality of his ban on transgender troops. The administration is appealing a judicial decision concluding that the policy appeared to be driven by an unconstitutional desire to harm a politically unpopular group.

The court's conservative majority, acting in a separate challenge to the ban, last year allowed the policy to take effect while the legal challenge proceeded.

Since last year, the court's majority has also ruled against transgender student athletes, allowed the administration to bar passport applicants from designating their gender identities on the document, and allowed states to ban gender-affirming medical care for transgender young people.

In a case to be heard this term, the Trump administration is backing a bid by parents in Washington state to challenge laws protecting the rights of transgender runaway children who seek gender-affirming care at shelters.

In another major case to be argued in December, the Trump administration is backing a challenge to the legality of state-level restrictions on assault-style rifles, a case that could give the justices another opportunity to expand gun rights.

California’s first-in-the-nation law regulating attorneys’ use of generative artificial intelligence gives law firms the thorny task of determining when their use of the increasingly ubiquitous technology requires disclosure.

The law, which takes effect on January 1, requires attorneys to disclose when they have used generative AI to create any document filed with the courts. Deciding how to meet the standard is easier said than done, given that AI is woven into several technology platforms used by law firms.

“The question every firm will be working through before January is what counts as using AI,” said Scott Meyers, chairman of law firm Akerman LLP. “It’s built into the research and drafting tools lawyers use every day.”

The disclosure requirement shows that addressing lawyer AI flaws, such as hallucinated case citations, comes with its own set of challenges. Firms expect to work through those difficulties, pointing to strengthened internal controls that they say will help ensure compliance with the California law.

“For most large law firms, the law is not going to change how we use AI,” said Daren Orzechowski, the Silicon Valley-based partner and global co-head of technology practice at A&O Shearman. The California statute “largely captures what lawyers should already be doing”, he said.

The SB 574 legislation, signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom on September 30, responds to a wave of AI hallucinations and fake or garbled case citations that have appeared in court filings nationwide. A California appeals court in March sanctioned counsel $5,000 for fictitious AI-generated citations in a custody dispute.

The law requires lawyers to verify every citation before filing and at least one attorney to sign each filing in their own name. It also bans lawyers from putting confidential client information into public AI tools and authorises courts to sanction violations.

Similarly, arbitrators cannot hand decisions over to AI under the new law and must tell the parties when they rely on AI-generated information.

While other states have addressed AI through courts and bar regulators, California is the first to put such rules into statute — a distinction that Meyers said matters.

“An ABA opinion is guidance, and SB 574 is law,” he said. While most of what California’s law asks of lawyers was already covered by ethics guidance, Meyers said, “the new duty is disclosure”.

The disclosure rule applies to all documents submitted to the court and has no exception for minor uses, said Peter Salib, an assistant law professor at the University of Houston Law Center. “A firm that uses AI to research, draft, or even edit a brief will need a standard disclosure and a way to track which filings AI touched,” he said.

Daniel W. Linna Jr., director of law and technology initiatives at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law and the McCormick School of Engineering, said the disclosure rule “is of little purpose, is burdensome, overbroad, and will chill lawyer use of AI”. He said lawyers should challenge the standard on First Amendment grounds.

The requirement that the attorney responsible for a filing personally verify citations, even those not generated by AI, “imposes quite an onerous burden on the attorney signing each document”, said Ariel House, a partner at Baker Botts who has written client alerts on the legislation.

Firms often have paralegals, who bill at lower rates than attorneys, check every case, quote and exhibit reference in a filing under a lawyer’s supervision, House said. The requirement for an attorney’s personal verification “takes time, and that burden could be especially significant for solo practitioners and small firms”, she said.

The law’s restrictions on handing legal work to AI could also become challenging for law firms, Meyers said, “because legal AI is moving from drafting documents to taking actions on a lawyer’s behalf”. Akerman designs its agentic tools so that a lawyer reviews the work and makes the final decision, he said.

“The biggest difference will be for lawyers who were outsourcing their judgment to AI,” Meyers said.