The nine-member panel took only two hours to return a verdict in favor of OpenAI on Monday, which the judge quickly adopted as her own final decision. Elon Musk suffered the worst defeat possible in his legal battle against OpenAI as a federal jury and a judge ruled he waited too long to bring his claims against the AI startup and its top executives, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman. The jury's decision was a nonbinding recommendation sent to US district judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, though she immediately accepted it on Monday as her own, making it final. The nine-member panel delivered the unanimous verdict in an Oakland, California courtroom after deliberating for under two hours. They found that statutes of limitations expired well before Musk filed his lawsuit in 2024.

The plaintiffs and defense have rested their cases, as well as their rear ends. The final stragglers testified on Wednesday in the trial. The witnesses generated few waves, aside from the revelation that Microsoft has so far spent over $100 billion on its partnership with OpenAI . Rather than focus on that, I wanted to bring you a candid observation that my colleague Maxwell Zeff and I can't stop talking about after spending nearly three weeks watching the trial. The courtroom is littered with butt cushions.

A new scale of humiliation ritual kicked off this week as Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI went to trial in Silicon Valley. The Tesla CEO, who co-founded OpenAI, is suing the artificial intelligence firm and two of its other co-founders, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, for diverting from its original nonprofit goal of developing A.I. for the public good in favor of for-profit motives. "This lawsuit is very simple: It is not OK to steal a charity," Musk said on the witness stand on Tuesday. The trial is big by every conceivable measure. Both Musk and OpenAI have mustered high-dollar legal armies who are prepared to wage potentially years of litigation, including this federal trial.

Elon Musk Testifies That He Started OpenAI to Prevent a'Terminator Outcome' The judge also warned Musk and Sam Altman to curb their "propensity to use social media to make things worse outside the courtroom" after both sides traded attacks online. Elon Musk and Sam Altman appeared in a federal courtroom together for the first time on Tuesday as they fight over OpenAI's decade-long evolution and what it means for the company's future. The trial in Musk's lawsuit against Altman could result in financial damages and, more significantly, governance changes at OpenAI that may complicate its plans for an initial public offering as soon as this year. As the first witness on the stand, Musk immediately sought to frame his case as more than just about OpenAI. Siding with Altman "will give license to looting every charity in America" and shake the "entire foundation of charitable giving," Musk told a panel of nine jurors advising US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers on how to rule.

Judges describe a campaign of firings and interference which threatens the system's independence. On a Thursday morning last month, Patrick O'Brien, a federal immigration judge, walked into his courtroom in downtown San Francisco. He was scheduled for a master-calendar hearing, a roll call, essentially, to get cases ready for trial. O'Brien was wearing a matte-black robe that seemed to absorb the artificial light overhead. He took his seat, scanned the room, and angled himself toward a computer monitor. The court was leanly staffed. There was a judicial clerk but no bailiff or stenographer. Opposite the judge were tables for the prosecution--the Department of Homeland Security--and for the respondent, a succession of immigrants who were applying for asylum. A Spanish interpreter appeared as a faceless box on a big screen. About ten people, all Latino, sat in wooden pews, gripping folders full of esoteric documents.

We propose an open-source framework for Command-style dictation that addresses the gap between resource-intensive Online systems and high-latency Batch processing. Our approach uses Voice Activity Detection (VAD) to segment audio and transcribes these segments in parallel using Whisper models, enabling efficient multiplexing across audios. Unlike proprietary systems like SuperWhisper, this framework is also compatible with most ASR architectures, including widely used CTC-based models. Our multiplexing technique maximizes compute utilization in real-world settings, as demonstrated by its deployment in around 15% of India's courtrooms. Evaluations on live data show consistent latency reduction as user concurrency increases, compared to sequential batch processing. The live demonstration will showcase our open-sourced implementation and allow attendees to interact with it in real-time.

One of Anthropic's lawyers had asked the company's AI model Claude to create a citation for a legal article, but Claude included the wrong title and author. Anthropic's attorney admitted that the mistake was not caught by anyone reviewing the document. Lastly, and perhaps most concerning, is a case unfolding in Israel. After police arrested an individual on charges of money laundering, Israeli prosecutors submitted a request asking a judge for permission to keep the individual's phone as evidence. But they cited laws that don't exist, prompting the defendant's attorney to accuse them of including AI hallucinations in their request.

People just can't stop using generative AI tools in legal proceedings, despite repeated pushback from frustrated judges. While AI initially appeared in courtrooms through bogus "hallucinated" cases the trend has taken a turn--driven by increasingly sophisticated AI video and audio tools. In some instances, AI is even being used to seemingly bring victims back from the dead. This week, a crime victim's family presented a brief video in an Arizona courtroom depicting an AI version of 37-year-old Chris Pelkey. Pelkey was shot and killed in 2021 in a road rage incident. Now, four years later, the AI-generated "clone" appeared to address his alleged killer in court.

Center for AI Safety Director Dan Hendrycks explains concerns about how the rapid growth of artificial intelligence could impact society. Judges are likely to take concerns over artificial intelligence into their own hands and create their own rules for the tech in courtrooms, experts say. U.S. District Judge Brantley Starr of the Northern District of Texas may have been a pioneer last week when he required lawyers who appear in his courtroom to certify they did not use artificial intelligence programs, such as ChatGPT, to draft their filings without a human checking for accuracy. "We're at least putting lawyers on notice, who might not otherwise be on notice, that they can't just trust those databases," Starr, a Trump appointed judge, told Reuters. "They've got to actually verify it themselves through a traditional database."

DoNotPay says it is pivoting away from plans to bring AI to a courtroom. DoNotPay, which bills itself as "the world's first robot lawyer," said last month that it planned to take on two speeding ticket cases in court in February, with its AI instructing the defendants how to respond to their assigned judges. The startup said it would cover any fines and the defendants will be compensated for taking part in the experiment. But CEO and founder Joshua Browder announced late last month that it would be "postponing" those plans, citing "threats from State Bar prosecutors." "Ultimately, it seemed like a distraction from using chatGPT technology to help with consumer rights issues," Browder said in an emailed statement. "We have decided to focus on consumer rights products, where we are very successful.