News Corporation CEO Robert Thomson launched aggressive criticism of AI companies during the company's fiscal Q4 2026 earnings call, threatening additional lawsuits against firms like Perplexity and Brave for allegedly scraping content without permission. The attacks came as News Corp reported declining digital subscriptions in Australia.
The EU AI Act's General-Purpose AI Code enters enforcement Sunday, with the European Commission in talks with OpenAI and Anthropic following recent AI agent hacking incidents. OpenAI's pre-deadline compliance statement notably omits the copyright training data chapter required under the GPAI Code.
India's Delhi High Court issued an interim ruling on July 24, 2026, finding that OpenAI's use of news agency ANI's content to train ChatGPT fell under fair dealing and did not constitute copyright infringement.
Reddit has discussed shutting off Google's access to its content for AI training as its $60 million annual deal nears expiration. The company's stock fell 9% on the news amid concerns about declining referral traffic from Google.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang publicly praised Chinese open-source AI models as 'excellent' and 'world class,' urging Washington not to ban them, even as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned of scrutinizing Chinese models for stolen intellectual property. The comments come amid growing concern in Washington over low-cost Chinese AI models like Kimi that increasingly compete with American offerings.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced the U.S. could impose sanctions on Chinese AI companies, particularly those developing open-source models, if evidence confirms they stole intellectual property from American AI developers. The statement represents an expansion of the Trump administration's efforts to counter China's AI advancement.
White House official Michael Kratsios claimed Moonshot accessed restricted Nvidia GB300 processors in Thailand and distilled its Kimi K3 model from Anthropic's Fable. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said sanctions remain on the table against Chinese AI companies over alleged IP theft.
Patreon has shifted from using robots.txt files to request AI bots not scrape creator content to actively blocking unauthorized AI training crawlers through Cloudflare's Crawl Control technology. The platform reports the new enforcement approach has significantly reduced scraping activity while still allowing legitimate search and discovery bots.
On 15 July 2026, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced a national AI framework and new Office of AI, introducing mandatory standards for data centres on power and water use, and strengthening copyright protections for artists whose works are used to train AI models.
The New York Times and other publishers filed court documents accusing OpenAI of withholding evidence about how its AI systems are trained and used, requesting legal sanctions in their ongoing copyright lawsuit.
Meta unveiled multiple AI products in July 2026, including the Muse Spark 1.1 coding model for developers, a new AI image generator integrated into Instagram and chatbot services, and its first paid AI model tier. The releases triggered privacy backlash as Instagram began automatically allowing users' public posts to be used for AI training unless they opt out.
Cloudflare announced it will block AI training crawlers by default starting September 15, 2026, requiring AI companies to separate their search crawlers from training bots. Pages displaying ads will automatically block training and agent bots unless publishers explicitly allow access, forcing AI companies to negotiate payment for content.
A joint investigation by four Canadian privacy regulators concluded that OpenAI violated federal and provincial privacy laws when training its ChatGPT model, resulting in the collection and use of sensitive personal information without proper consent or safeguards.
The Academy has ruled that AI-generated performances and screenplays are now ineligible for Oscar consideration, marking a significant policy shift in how the film industry treats AI-created content.
A German Higher Regional Court ruled that an AI-generated comic adaptation of a copyrighted photograph does not constitute copyright infringement as long as only the motif is copied, establishing new legal precedent for AI-generated derivative works.
Spotify announced it surpassed 300 million paid subscribers in Q2 2026 while securing a licensing agreement with Merlin, representing over 30,000 independent labels, for its upcoming AI-powered remix and covers tool. The paid feature will allow fans to create AI-generated remixes of participating artists' music, following an earlier partnership with Universal Music Group.
Rival AI companies OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have begun collaborating to prevent Chinese competitors from extracting results from cutting-edge U.S. AI models, marking an unprecedented cooperation among typically competing firms.
Folk artist Murphy Campbell discovered multiple AI-generated fake songs attributed to her on Spotify, becoming a target for both AI impersonation and copyright trolling in a case highlighting vulnerabilities in music platforms' content verification systems.
Anthropic issued mass DMCA takedown notices after accidentally exposing parts of Claude Code's internal source code in a recent release, inadvertently removing thousands of unrelated GitHub projects. The company has since retracted the bulk of the notices and called it an accident.
