Thelonious ICYMI — Edition 9 — 4 June 2026
Welcome to the 9th edition of ICYMI — your weekly briefing on the developments shaping the AI legal and regulatory landscape, curated from Thelonious.
Here’s a snapshot of what’s inside this week:
- Florida vs. OpenAI — The Florida Attorney General alleges that OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman deceptively marketed ChatGPT as safe while concealing its potential to addict minors, degrade cognitive skills, and fuel violence or self-harm. The state claims the defendants prioritized profit over safety, releasing a dangerously unreliable product that constitutes a public nuisance and violates the Florida Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act.
- The Creator Act — This proposed US federal bill that would establish a new intellectual property right for visual artists. It aims to protect their signature styles from intentional, commercial impersonation enabled by AI systems. The Act would grant artists legal recourse, including the ability to seek damages and demand the cessation of such impersonation, without restricting artistic influence or general AI research.
- CNN vs. Perplexity — CNN alleges that Perplexity AI engaged in massive copyright and trademark infringement by unlawfully scraping and copying over 17,000 pieces of CNN content, including paywalled articles, to power its AI products. The complaint asserts that Perplexity bypassed technical controls, generated verbatim outputs, and used CNN’s trademarks to attribute fabricated content to the news organization.
- Bernie Sanders Discusses AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act — Senator Bernie Sanders Act proposes a federal requirement for large AI companies to contribute a portion of their equity to a publicly-owned sovereign wealth fund. This fund would distribute dividends to the public, aiming to share the economic benefits generated by artificial intelligence and prevent wealth concentration.
- CMA Secures Fairer Deal For Publishers — On June 3, 2026, the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) imposed a new conduct requirement for Google’s search services in the United Kingdom.This requirement, a world-first, enables publishers to opt out of their content being used to power AI features in Google search, such as AI Overviews, and for the fine-tuning of AI models.