The Law, Catching Up.
Three cases nobody's covering, the docket to watch, and what Compute! actually thinks.
Three Cases Nobody’s Covering
United States v. Heppner. — United States v. Heppner. Judge Jed Rakoff ruled a defendant’s chats with Claude are not privileged (S.D.N.Y., Feb 2026). Every enterprise running confidential work through a public chatbot should read it twice.
Louis v. SafeRent. — Louis v. SafeRent. The housing-algorithm settlement that quietly made independent audits the price of doing business — $2.275M, plus a five-year ban on scoring voucher applicants by algorithm.
GEMA v. OpenAI. — GEMA v. OpenAI. The Munich ruling that did, in Europe, what no U.S. court has yet dared: held the model directly liable for the lyrics it reproduced.
Docket Watch
Sony / UMG v. Suno — fair-use summary-judgment hearing, July 2026 (D. Mass.). The one that prices generative music.
Dow Jones v. Perplexity — the test of whether AI search may quote your paywall back to you.
NYT v. OpenAI — discovery grinds on; 20 million logs and counting.
The road to the Supreme Court — sooner or later, nine justices decide whether training on the open web is fair use. Everything above is the undercard.
Moves
John Jumper — Nobel laureate, AlphaFold, nearly nine years at Google DeepMind — leaves for Anthropic (announced ~19 June). His first lab-hop, and he’s taking some time to recharge first.
Noam Shazeer — Gemini co-lead, Character.AI founder, brought back to Google in 2024 — leaves for OpenAI, one day before Jumper. Two landmark Google losses in 48 hours. He is also, per Wave III, a named defendant who just settled.
Barret Zoph — remember him? (Issue №2, #4, INTERVAL: 0 DAYS.) Five months after rejoining OpenAI to run enterprise, he’s out again.
The Verdict: The Law, Catching Up.
Here’s the part the doom-scroll skips: none of this is happening in secret. The rules of AI are being written in open court, by people with names you can look up, in cases you can read. That’s slower than a law. It’s also harder to lobby and impossible to hide. The machines moved fast. The courts are moving on purpose.
Three things the docket has already made plain:
This is the law catching up. Not shutting down.
— NW
- Two words now decide a vendor contract: indemnification and audit. The ones who flinch at both are the risk.
- Every AI chat is discoverable. It isn’t privileged (see Heppner) — a fact worth knowing before the next prompt.
- The licensed tools are the bet. The unlicensed era is closing, and the bill always arrives.