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By: Moish Peltz
AI copyright missed the cut at the Supreme Court, the SEC sent its token taxonomy framework to the White House, and New York legislators took a swing at chatbot operators everywhere.
Here’s what’s on the docket:
- 🏛️ SEC submits crypto token framework to the White House
- ⚖️ Courts dismiss Uniswap class action and decline AI copyright appeal
- 🤖 New York and California push aggressive AI liability and disclosure rules
- 🧹 SEC clears enforcement backlog — Justin Sun case settled for $10M
- 📈 AI adoption in legal practice doubles — and the privilege risks multiply
- 💵 Florida advances stablecoin legislation ahead of federal action
1. AI Hits a Legal Wall — Copyright, Disclosure, and Liability
- The Supreme Court just told AI creators: your output isn’t protectable. SCOTUS declined to hear a dispute over copyright for AI-generated material, leaving the status quo intact, with a presumption of no federal copyright protection for AI output. Every company relying on AI-generated content should take note. (SCOTUS Docket) (Reuters) (Law360)
- California’s AI disclosure law survives its first challenge. xAI (Elon Musk’s AI lab) failed to block California’s AI transparency requirements. Other states are watching as this could become the template. (Order, X.AI LLC v. Bonta) (Law360)
- New York wants to ban chatbots from giving legal or medical advice. A new bill would expand operator liability and effectively prohibit AI from dispensing professional advice. If it passes, every legal AI tool on the market that does business in New York faces an existential question. (S7263 Bill Text) (Law360 Pulse) (StateCoop)
- Meanwhile, an insurer just sued OpenAI for doing exactly what the New York bill targets. Nippon Life Insurance filed suit in the Northern District of Illinois, alleging that ChatGPT acted as an unlicensed legal advisor, encouraged a user to breach a settlement agreement, and facilitated abuse of process. The case is early (and IMO kind of silly), but it’s a live test of the theory that chatbot operators bear liability when their tools dispense professional advice. (Complaint, Nippon Life Ins. Co. of Am. v. OpenAI)
- “ChatGPT” is just a description, not a brand. The TTAB ruled the CHATGPT mark is merely descriptive of chatbot software and rejected OpenAI’s trademark application. A cautionary tale for every AI company banking on a product name that describes what the product does. (TTAB Opinion) (TTAB Blog)
- Former NPR host claims Google trained AI on his voice without consent. A voice actor and journalist alleges that Google trained its AI to mimic his voice without authorization — a case grounded in voice and likeness law rather than copyright, adding a new dimension to the growing body of AI training data disputes. (Law360)
2. AI in the Law Firm — Adoption, Privilege, and Practice
- New data on which jobs AI is actually displacing (hint: watch out lawyers). Anthropic’s latest labor market research introduces an “observed exposure” metric combining theoretical LLM capability with real-world usage data. The headline finding: actual AI penetration remains a fraction of what’s technically feasible, but the occupations with the highest observed exposure skew toward educated, higher-paid professionals, such as legal work. For lawyers, the implication is double-edged: AI adoption is a competitive advantage now, but the displacement risk concentrates in precisely the knowledge-work tasks that define the profession. (Anthropic Research)
- Legal AI adoption doubled in a year — and solo practitioners are leading. A new report shows individual lawyers are outpacing BigLaw on AI integration. The gap between early adopters and holdouts is becoming a competitive chasm. (LawNext)
- AI is now sitting in on depositions. Litigators report using AI at every stage — from prep to real-time analysis during testimony. The deposition room will never look the same. (Above the Law)
- Your AI tool choice may be waiving privilege. I enjoyed the analysis here of five distinct attorney-client privilege risk profiles. If you’re not thinking about this, you’re already exposed. (Law360)
- AI killed the standard IP clause. Boilerplate IP provisions can’t handle AI-generated work product. Contracts need an architectural overhaul, not a patch. (Above the Law)
3. Crypto Policy
- The SEC’s token taxonomy framework just landed on the President’s desk. The SEC submitted a formal framework for applying existing securities laws to digital assets — a structural proposal that could define which tokens are securities and which aren’t, for the foreseeable future. This isn’t enforcement-by-litigation anymore; it’s rulemaking. (CoinTelegraph) (The Block)
- Atkins is speed-running the enforcement cleanup. The SEC dropped its fraud case against Tron founder Justin Sun, settling for a $10M civil penalty. (Bloomberg) (DL News)
- Uniswap dismissed. A court dismissed the class action against Uniswap over scam token losses, but the ruling is narrow — DeFi protocol liability is far from settled law. (Opinion, Risley v. Universal Navigation) (DL News) (The Defiant)
- Florida isn’t waiting for Congress on stablecoins. Florida State Senate lawmakers passed stablecoin legislation, integrating the federal GENIUS Act and adding additional requirements in Florida. Will more states follow? (Bill Text) (DL News)
- Stablecoin companies are betting on AI agents as their next customers. Bloomberg reports that stablecoin firms are positioning for autonomous AI-to-AI payments — a market that barely exists but could reshape digital finance. (Bloomberg)
- Pudgy Penguins hit with trademark infringement suit. PEI Licensing filed against the NFT brand, a reminder that Web3 branding doesn’t exist in a trademark vacuum. (Complaint, PEI Licensing v. Pudgy Penguins) (CoinTelegraph)
- Crypto is becoming a divorce problem. Digital assets are complicating asset discovery and valuation in family law proceedings. Interesting angle but niche for this week. (DL News)
The state-level impulse to regulate AI and digital assets is running well ahead of the analysis required to do it well. New York’s S7263 treats a technology distribution problem as a credentialing problem, using licensing categories designed for the 20th century to govern 21st-century tools. This results in restricting consumer access with no corresponding reduction in actual risk. California’s AI transparency mandate, now upheld against xAI’s challenge, imposes disclosure obligations that sound reasonable until you consider that the underlying training data questions it targets are still unsettled even among researchers. And Florida’s decision to draft its own stablecoin framework rather than wait for federal implementation guarantees exactly the kind of jurisdictional fragmentation that makes compliance expensive and innovation harder.
This state-by-state patchwork approach to regulating technology is going to be onerous.
Questions? Insights? Your feedback shapes the docket. Reply or reach out.
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Block & Order Weekly Docket | Week of March 2 – 8, 2026
For legal professionals navigating crypto, AI, and emerging technology law. The materials in this article are for informational purposes only and are not legal advice. Do not act upon this information without first seeking advice from an attorney licensed in your jurisdiction.