Intellectual Property

New York has enacted sweeping restrictions on synthetic performers in fashion and beauty advertising. Governor Kathy Hochul signed two bills into law on December 11, 2025—the Fashion Workers Act (S9832) and synthetic performer disclosure laws (S.8420-A/A.8887-B)—that take effect June 19, 2026. The laws require explicit consent from human models before their likenesses can be replicated digitally and mandate clear disclaimers whenever AI avatars appear in advertisements. Violations carry fines of $500 to $1,000. The New York Department of Labor will oversee model agency registration by June 2026. These rules arrive as brands including H&M plan to deploy digital twins for marketing, and virtual models like Shudu and Lil Miquela compete directly with human performers for contracts.

The Department of Justice unsealed an indictment in March 2026 charging three individuals tied to Super Micro Computer—two former employees and one contractor—with conspiring to violate U.S. export controls. The defendants allegedly diverted approximately $2.5 billion worth of servers containing advanced AI technology, including Nvidia chips, to China between 2024 and 2025. The indictment names co-founder and former senior vice president Yih‑Shyan "Wally" Liaw and a general manager from Super Micro's Taiwan office, who prosecutors say coordinated shipments through a third-party intermediary to circumvent export restrictions. Super Micro itself is not charged and has stated it was not accused of wrongdoing.

Venable LLP hosted a special episode of its podcast AI and IP: The Legal Frontier on April 30, 2026, bringing together Justin Pierce (co-chair of Venable's Intellectual Property Division), Jason Yao of China's Wanhuida law firm, and Toby Bond of UK-based Bird & Bird to examine how artificial intelligence is fracturing intellectual property law across jurisdictions. The discussion centered on three distinct regulatory approaches: China's willingness to protect AI-generated outputs when meaningful human input is present; the UK and EU's insistence on human authorship and originality; and the US framework built on human contribution and fair use doctrine.

In the first quarter of 2026, autonomous AI workflow agents including Openclaw demonstrated the ability to generate production-ready software directly from user specifications. The capability triggered immediate debate over intellectual property ownership, developer liability, and the legal framework governing self-generating code.

Congress moved on two fronts in late March to shape AI regulation. On March 26, bipartisan lawmakers introduced H.R. 8094, the AI Foundation Model Transparency Act, requiring developers of large language models to disclose training methods, purposes, risks, evaluation protocols, and monitoring practices. The bill imposes no affirmative regulation—only disclosure obligations. One week earlier, the Trump Administration released its National Policy Framework for Artificial Intelligence, a non-binding document recommending Congress adopt unified federal standards across seven areas: child protection, AI infrastructure, intellectual property, free speech, innovation, workforce development, and preemption of state law. The framework followed Senator Marsha Blackburn's March 18 discussion draft of the Trump America AI Act, which would codify President Trump's December 2025 executive order directing federal preemption of state AI laws.

Anthropic has asked a California federal judge to rule that its use of copyrighted materials to train Claude qualifies as transformative fair use, comparing the AI's training process to how humans learn by reading and absorbing themes. The filing stands apart from the $1.5 billion class-action settlement in Bartz v. Anthropic, where the claims deadline passed on March 30, 2026, and a fairness hearing is scheduled for May 14, 2026, in San Francisco federal court.

On May 5, 2026, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni reposted an AI-generated image of herself in lingerie across her social media accounts—deliberately amplifying a fake that had circulated online. Rather than ignore it, she republished the image herself with a warning about synthetic media dangers, joking that the creators had "improved" her appearance. The move was framed as a public service announcement demonstrating how convincingly AI can fabricate imagery.

Elon Musk testified April 28 in a California courtroom that OpenAI breached a foundational promise by converting from nonprofit to for-profit status. Now valued at $852 billion, OpenAI made the shift despite Musk's 2017 warning that the company should either remain nonprofit or operate independently. "It is not OK to steal a charity," Musk told the court, referencing email exchanges with Sam Altman in which Altman expressed support for the nonprofit model but acknowledged no legal obligation bound the company to it permanently.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office launched a beta AI-powered image search tool in April 2026 that lets users upload images to retrieve visually similar marks from the federal register. Accessed through a camera icon on the trademark search system, the tool functions like reverse image search—users log into their USPTO.gov account, upload an image or link, and receive results showing marks with related design elements. The USPTO announced the tool alongside other AI enhancements, including a mark description generator and the Trademark Classification Agentic Codification Tool (Class ACT), which automates backend classification work that previously took months.

Venable LLP has published a legal analysis identifying a critical gap in U.S. law: traditional agency doctrine does not clearly govern autonomous AI systems, leaving liability allocation ambiguous when these systems act beyond their intended scope. Unlike human agents, AI systems lack independent legal status, forcing courts to apply existing doctrines—attribution, apparent authority, negligence, and product liability—in unprecedented ways. At least one jurisdiction has already moved forward. In Moffatt v. Air Canada, British Columbia courts held a company liable for inaccurate statements made through an AI chatbot, signaling that courts are beginning to assign responsibility despite the legal framework's uncertainty.

DeepSeek, a Hangzhou-based AI startup, released a preview of its V4 large language model on April 24, 2026, with variants including the 1.6 trillion-parameter V4-Pro and 284 billion-parameter V4-Flash. Huawei announced the same day that its Ascend AI processors would provide "full support" for the models. The V4-Pro demonstrated significant cost advantages—$3.48 per million output tokens compared to $30 for OpenAI's GPT-5.4—while matching or exceeding open-source competitors on coding and reasoning benchmarks. The launch triggered immediate market activity, with major Chinese tech firms moving to secure Huawei chips as alternatives to restricted Nvidia hardware, and SMIC, Huawei's chipmaker, rising 10 percent while competing Chinese AI firms saw shares drop over 9 percent.

The Federal Circuit issued a precedential decision on April 29, 2026, in Federal Express Corporation v. Qualcomm Incorporated that significantly narrows appellate review of Patent Trial and Appeal Board decisions. The court held that challenges to the PTAB's handling of real-party-in-interest disputes under 35 U.S.C. § 312(a)(2) cannot be appealed. The ruling treats RPI objections as integral to the institution decision itself, placing them beyond the scope of review under 35 U.S.C. § 314(d), which makes all institution rulings final and unreviewable absent constitutional violations or actions outside the agency's statutory authority.

Jury selection began April 28 in Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and Microsoft in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in Oakland. Opening statements occurred April 29. Musk alleges OpenAI breached its 2015 nonprofit founding agreement by converting to a for-profit model in 2019 with Microsoft backing, abandoning its stated mission to develop AI for humanity's benefit. He invested $38–45 million in the company. Musk seeks OpenAI's return to nonprofit status, removal of Altman and Brockman from leadership, and $134–150 billion in damages to be redirected to OpenAI's charitable arm.

Singer Dua Lipa sued Samsung for $15 million on May 8, 2026, in federal court in California, alleging copyright infringement, trademark infringement, right of publicity violations, and false endorsement under state law and the Lanham Act. The dispute centers on a backstage photograph taken at the 2024 Austin City Limits Festival—an image Lipa owns—that Samsung allegedly manipulated and used on television packaging and global marketing materials beginning in early 2025 without permission, payment, or her involvement. Lipa claims the placement implied her endorsement of Samsung products and drove sales.

BakerHostetler released a podcast in April 2026 synthesizing the USPTO's evolving approach to artificial intelligence across patent operations, policy, and practice. The discussion centers on the agency's January 2025 Artificial Intelligence Strategy, which established five pillars: fostering responsible AI innovation, enhancing intellectual property policies, building AI infrastructure, promoting ethical use, and developing workforce expertise. The strategy builds on Executive Order 14110 (October 2023), which directed the USPTO to issue guidance on AI inventorship and patent eligibility. The agency has since revised its inventorship standards to require significant human contribution and bar AI as an independent inventor, and updated patent eligibility determinations under the Alice/Mayo framework in July 2024. Internally, the USPTO deployed SCOUT, a generative AI tool used by over 200 examiners for prior art analysis and cybersecurity tasks.

Five major publishing houses—Elsevier, Cengage, Hachette, Macmillan, and McGraw Hill—filed a class-action lawsuit against Meta Platforms and CEO Mark Zuckerberg on May 5, 2026, in Manhattan federal court. The publishers allege Meta systematically downloaded millions of copyrighted books and journal articles from pirate repositories including LibGen and Anna's Archive to train its Llama generative AI model without authorization or payment. The complaint further charges that Meta stripped copyright-management information from the works to obscure their sources. Author Scott Turow joined as a named plaintiff. The defendants face unspecified monetary damages claims and potential class certification covering broader copyright holders.

A new review in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery by Pun et al. examines how artificial intelligence is reshaping drug discovery by accelerating target identification and candidate generation through multi-omics integration, knowledge graphs, and foundation models. The research finds that AI now embeds patentability, commercial tractability, and competitor analysis directly into target assessment alongside traditional druggability and safety metrics. This shift moves the bottleneck from initial discovery to confident selection of candidates for validation and invention—a fundamental change in how pharmaceutical companies prioritize their pipelines.