Google's Magic-State Cultivation Result in Science, 15 October 2026: What the Willow Experiment Tests in the Under-a-Million-Qubit RSA-2048 Estimate
What Google published in Science on 15 October 2026
Google Quantum AI reports in Science that magic-state cultivation, a technique its researchers proposed in 2024, works on real hardware. On the Willow processor the team measured an upper bound of about 1 × 10-4 on the error of cultivated T-type magic states, roughly 40 times lower than without cultivation, counting only the runs with no detected error; about 8% of attempts were kept. In a separate step it grafted a cultivated state from a small color code into a distance-5 surface code. Magic states supply the non-Clifford operations needed for universal fault-tolerant computation, and they are among its most costly ingredients.
Why the result matters for RSA-2048 and post-quantum planning
Craig Gidney's May 2025 estimate that a machine with fewer than one million noisy qubits could factor a 2048-bit RSA key in under a week relies partly on cultivation to shrink the space spent on magic states. The new paper is the first hardware test of that assumption. It confirms the mechanism at small scale and leaves the scale-up open: the measured error bound of about one in 10,000 sits roughly six orders of magnitude above the one-in-10-billion magic-state quality cited for breaking RSA-2048. This post reads the paper closely and sets it beside NIST's proposed transition dates for post-quantum cryptography and the separate procurement and platform deadlines already running.
New York City's $29.2 Million QFab Award to NYU, Announced 14 October 2026: How the City's 15% Share of Quantum IP Proceeds and Three Advisory Seats Would Work
What New York City and NYU announced on 14 October 2026
Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani, Deputy Mayor for Economic Justice Julie Su and NYCEDC chief executive Anthony Shorris announced that the city will award $29.2 million to New York University for QFab, a quantum fabrication facility of 23,000 square feet at 770 Broadway. NYU adds $255 million for construction and ten years of operations. The facility is expected to open in 2030 with cleanrooms, cryogenics and equipment for making and testing quantum chips and components, open to researchers, students, startups and established companies.
What the city receives in return for its quantum investment
The city gets three seats on the QFab Executive Advisory Board. When intellectual property is created at QFab using tools the city funded, it also receives 15% of NYU Central Administration's proceeds from that IP, including equity, royalties, milestone payments and patent licenses. The city calls this a first-of-its-kind agreement. Read closely, the 15% applies to one slice of one revenue stream. This post reconstructs the deal from the public announcement, compares it with the federal Bayh-Dole rules of 1980 and the US government's passive 9.9% Intel stake of 2025, and lists what the unpublished agreement still has to settle.
Executive Order 14409 Says It Creates No AI Licensing Requirement: What Is Known About the Unpublished Frontier Model Pre-Release Review Framework Before the 30 October 2026 FOIA Deadline
What Executive Order 14409 of 2 June 2026 says about frontier AI models
Executive Order 14409, "Promoting Advanced Artificial Intelligence Innovation and Security," told the Treasury, the National Security Agency and CISA to build a classified benchmark for the cyber capabilities of AI models and a voluntary framework through which developers give the government access to a covered frontier model for up to 30 days before release to "trusted partners." Section 3(c) adds that nothing in the section authorizes "a mandatory governmental licensing, preclearance, or permitting requirement" for releasing new AI models.
Why the 30 October 2026 FOIA deadline matters for AI developers
The framework was reportedly completed by 1 August 2026 and shown to companies at a White House meeting, but its text has never been published. In a joint status report dated 15 September 2026 in Protect Democracy Project v. Office of the National Cyber Director, federal agencies agreed to produce responsive records on the framework text, the GOLD EAGLE clearinghouse terms, the trusted partners and the legal authority behind them by 30 October 2026, with an index of anything withheld under FOIA exemptions. A Lawfare analysis of 13 October calls the arrangement a de facto AI model licensing system. This post compares the order's no-licensing clause with what is publicly documented today.
Germany's Post-Quantum Guideline From BMI, BMDS and BSI, Published 12 October 2026: Crypto Inventories by End-2026, High-Risk Systems by 2030, and the Legal Weight of BSI Act Section 30
What BMI, BMDS and BSI published on 12 October 2026
Germany's Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI), its Federal Ministry for Digital Transformation and Government Modernisation (BMDS) and the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) have jointly published a ten-page guideline on the national implementation of the EU roadmap for the transition to post-quantum cryptography. It addresses federal, state and municipal administrations, companies and operators of critical infrastructure. High-risk use cases should move to quantum-safe cryptography by the end of 2030, and medium-risk use cases by the end of 2035. By the end of 2026 every organization should have completed an initial cryptographic inventory, named a responsible office and started the first migration steps.
Why the German timetable is guidance with a legal edge
The guideline calls its deadlines urgent recommendations and asks Germany's IT Planning Council and the critical-infrastructure partnership UP KRITIS to make them binding by the end of 2026. It also points to section 30 of the BSI Act, which requires important and particularly important entities under the NIS2 regime to take security measures that meet the state of the art, including concepts for the use of cryptography. The guideline places post-quantum cryptography under that heading, recommends hybrid schemes, and asks that procurement treat crypto-agility as a default requirement. This post follows the dates from 1994 to 2035 and marks where each one carries legal force.
MAS Guidelines on AI Risk Management, 7 October 2026: What Singapore Expects Banks and Insurers to Do About AI Inventories, AI Agents and Kill Switches by 2027 and 2028
What the Monetary Authority of Singapore issued on 7 October 2026
The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has published its final Guidelines on Artificial Intelligence Risk Management, following a consultation that opened in November 2025. The 30-page document applies to all financial institutions in Singapore and to all forms of AI, including generative AI and AI agents. It takes effect on 7 October 2027. Institutions are expected to meet the oversight and inventory expectations from that date and may phase in the life cycle controls and capability expectations until 7 October 2028. Institutions with material AI use are expected to keep an AI inventory, rate the risk of each use case and have the board set an appetite for AI risk; those whose AI is unlikely to have a material adverse impact may follow a lighter basic regime.
Why AI agents and third-party models sit at the center of the MAS guidelines
MAS rates each use case on three dimensions: impact, complexity and reliance. Reliance explicitly includes the autonomy granted to the system and how much a human is involved. For AI agents, MAS suggests the inventory record which tools and systems the agent can reach and which guardrails constrain it. From October 2028, high-risk uses are expected to have fallback plans, and where an institution has built a kill switch, its activation protocol should be tested regularly. A bank that buys its AI from a vendor stays accountable for it. This post reads the document section by section and sets it beside the US and EU approaches.
Pentagon PIV and CAC Smart Cards Must Use Post-Quantum Algorithms by 2030, Says DoD PQC Director Britta Hale: Why Every Card Reader and Server Has to Be Ready by the End of 2029
What DoD's post-quantum director said about PIV and CAC cards
Britta Hale, director of post-quantum cryptography at the Defense Department, told an AFCEA DC audience that Personal Identity Verification (PIV) cards and Common Access Cards (CACs) have to carry the new algorithms by 2030. Federal News Network reported her remarks on 9 October 2026. Her reasoning runs backwards from that date: if a card arrives with post-quantum signatures and the reader, server or certificate authority behind it cannot process them, the holder is locked out. In practice, she said, every system and product in the department has to be ready by the end of 2029.
Why the identity card sets the pace for federal PQC migration
A smart card is a small computer with limited memory, issued in the millions and replaced on a multi-year cycle. ML-DSA, the NIST post-quantum signature standard and the leading candidate for the card, produces signatures roughly 38 to 72 times larger than a raw elliptic-curve signature. NIST is revising SP 800-73 and SP 800-78, the two documents that define the card interface and its algorithms, and GSA's FICAM program is piloting a post-quantum PKI for the Federal PKI. This post sets the DoD date against the governmentwide 2030, 2031 and 2035 milestones and against what the card standards still have to change.
Who Is Criminally Liable When an AI Agent Breaks Federal Law and Nobody Intended It? CRS Legal Sidebar LSB11487 of 8 October 2026 on the CFAA, Intent and the Responsible Corporate Officer Doctrine
What the Congressional Research Service published on 8 October 2026
Legal Sidebar LSB11487, "Artificial Intelligence and Federal Criminal Law: Considerations for Congress," asks what happens under federal law when an AI agent carrying out lawful instructions does something that would be a crime if a person did it. Its answer is direct. People who use AI tools to commit crimes on purpose can already be charged under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the wire fraud statute and the identity theft statute. When nobody intended the act, CRS finds that federal prosecution is most likely unavailable.
Why intent blocks the usual routes
Aiding and abetting, corporate liability through employees and conspiracy liability all depend on someone's intent to commit a crime. An operator who deploys an agent for lawful work has none, so the agent's unexpected hacking leaves a gap in federal criminal liability. CRS concludes that new legislation would likely be needed to close it.
Which doctrine Congress could borrow
The Sidebar points to the public welfare offense and the responsible corporate officer doctrine, which the Supreme Court developed in two food and drug prosecutions, United States v. Dotterweich in 1943 and United States v. Park in 1975. Under them an officer with authority to prevent or promptly correct a violation can be convicted without proof that he knew of it. CRS sets out how Congress could write that model into the CFAA for AI agent developers and operators, and what limits it would need.
DARPA Moves IBM, IonQ, Atom Computing and Diraq Into Stage C of the Quantum Benchmarking Initiative on 7 October 2026: What Government Testing of Their Hardware Must Show by 2033
What DARPA announced on 7 October 2026
The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency moved four companies into Stage C of its Quantum Benchmarking Initiative: Atom Computing with neutral-atom arrays, Diraq with silicon CMOS spin qubits, IBM with modular superconducting processors and IonQ with trapped ions. They join Microsoft and PsiQuantum, which reached Stage C through an earlier DARPA pilot. Since mid-2024 the initiative has evaluated more than 20 companies. Its question is whether any approach can reach utility-scale operation, meaning computational value above cost, by 2033.
How Stage C differs from the first two stages
Stages A and B judged concepts and research plans, with awards of up to $1 million and $15 million. In Stage C a government evaluation team works alongside each company and tests its hardware to see whether the proposed machine can be constructed as designed and operated as intended. DARPA's program page puts Stage C awards at up to $300 million per performer.
Why outside testing matters for buyers and investors
Quantum roadmaps have so far been judged mostly on the vendors' own milestones. IBM, for one, says it expects to deliver its first fault-tolerant system in 2029. DARPA will now report its independent verification results to other U.S. government stakeholders. If those findings become accessible beyond government, hospitals, banks, ministries and investors that buy on roadmaps could gain a second reference point.
Prof. Mauritz Kop Speaks at Quantum Innovation 2026 in Nagoya, Japan, With Elham Kashefi, Dorit Aharonov, and Google Quantum AI
Prof. Mauritz Kop, founder of the Stanford Center for Responsible Quantum Technology and of Quentir, speaks at Quantum Innovation 2026 in Nagoya, the International Symposium on Quantum Science, Technology and Innovation organized by Japan's Quantum Technology Innovation Hubs from December 8 to 11, 2026. His talk, Before Q-Day: Responsible Quantum Innovation, Standards, and the Post-Quantum Transition, closes the Practical Quantum Computing session on December 8, and he will also visit a quantum computer in Japan with the delegation.
Japan's Quantum Ecosystem in One Program
Co-organized by the Cabinet Office, three ministries, JST, RIKEN, AIST, NICT, Q-STAR, and leading universities, and sponsored by Fujitsu, Toyota, Toshiba, and Hitachi, the symposium brings keynotes by Dorit Aharonov, Amir Yacoby, and Hoi-Kwong Lo and invited talks by Elham Kashefi and leaders from Google Quantum AI, IonQ, Intel, the Weizmann Institute, the University of Toronto, and RIKEN.
Standards, Assurance, and Allied Cooperation
After two talks on quantum cryptanalysis, Kop closes the session from 5:40 to 6:10 PM Japan time with a talk on responsible quantum innovation, standards, and the post-quantum migration. Our article also profiles Japan's quantum hardware at RIKEN, Fujitsu, Quantinuum, and IBM, the industrial setting of Nagoya, and Japan Quantum Week.
Prof. Mauritz Kop, Principal Investigator, Leads CIGI's Quantum Nexus Workshop on Canadian Strategic Advantage, With Six Emerging Scholars
On Wednesday, October 21, 2026, Prof. Mauritz Kop, Senior Fellow and Principal Investigator at the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), leads the workshop of the CIGI project The Quantum Nexus: A Framework for Canadian Strategic Advantage in a Contested Domain. A public online expert panel from 12:00 to 1:00 PM Eastern Time is followed by a closed-door roundtable with senior officials, laboratory leaders, and legal and industry experts from Canada, the United States, and Europe.
Supply Chains, Quantum-AI, Standards, and Allied Strategy
SLAC Director John Sarrao, Dalhousie's Michael Karanicolas, Tina Dekker, Queen's University's Michael P. A. Murphy, and Copenhagen's Timo Minssen each take one front of the quantum competition, with CIGI's Tracey Forrest opening the session. The roundtable includes Dominic Rochon of the Privy Council Office, CIPO's Konstantinos Georgaras, former U.S. export-control chief Kevin J. Wolf, Michele Mosca, and Larry Diamond. The project, funded by the Department of National Defence's MINDS program, aims at strategic advantage for Canada and its allies.
Six Emerging Scholars and the Founding of CIGI
Six emerging scholars, personally selected and mentored by Kop, join the workshop and will contribute to the final CIGI report. Our article also traces Kop's work with Canada, from the Council of Canadian Academies panel chaired by the late Raymond Laflamme to the Nexus paper, and the history of CIGI, founded in 2001 by BlackBerry's Jim Balsillie in Waterloo's Quantum Valley.
Prof. Mauritz Kop Invited to the Inaugural ACM PQQS 2026 in Silicon Valley, With Turing Award Laureate Charles Bennett, Dan Boneh, and Google Quantum AI's Ryan Babbush
Prof. Mauritz Kop, Founder of the Stanford Center for Responsible Quantum Technology and of Quentir, has been invited to speak at ACM PQQS 2026, where Turing Award laureate Charles Bennett of IBM Research also gives a keynote. The first ACM Conference on Post-Quantum and Quantum-based Security runs from November 2 to 4, 2026 in Silicon Valley near San Jose. The program lists his affiliations at CIGI and the U.S. Air Force Academy, and his talk is titled The Race to Quantum First: Building a Secure and Responsible Quantum Future.
A New ACM Venue for Quantum-Era Security
ACM's security community built PQQS as a new annual forum for post-quantum cryptography, quantum cryptography, and the security of quantum computing systems. The program combines twenty-six peer-reviewed papers with keynotes by Charles Bennett of IBM Research, Stanford's Dan Boneh, Google Quantum AI's Ryan Babbush, ETH Zurich's Renato Renner, and Cisco Research's Ramana Kompella, invited talks by Bart Preneel, Reza Nejabati, Vipul Goyal, Yevgeniy Dodis, and J.R. Rao, and a panel with Dustin Moody, who leads the NIST post-quantum cryptography project, and Michele Mosca.
Kop's Talk: Procurement, the LSI Test, and Allied Coalition Scale
Kop's talk treats the race to quantum first as a contest for power and proposes a governance agenda that makes responsible innovation an instrument of strategic leadership: public procurement that accelerates post-quantum adoption, the LSI test for security measures, a hospital example for critical infrastructure, coalition scale among allies, and a European Quantum Act architecture. It builds on Stanford RQT's foundational work and on his War on the Rocks essays read across the U.S. national security community.
Prof. Mauritz Kop Invited to Co-Opting AI: Quantum at the University of Virginia, on Quantum, AI, and Geopolitics With Paul Davies and Shohini Ghose
Prof. Mauritz Kop, Founder of the Stanford Center for Responsible Quantum Technology and of Quentir, has been invited to speak at Co-Opting AI: Quantum, the University of Virginia's public conversation on Wednesday, October 28, 2026, from 4:00 to 5:15 PM Eastern Time. The online event is hosted by UVA's Digital Technology for Democracy Lab, NYU's Institute for Public Knowledge, and Sloane Lab, with the physicists Paul Davies and Shohini Ghose and with Professor Mona Sloane as host.
Co-Opting AI: Quantum on October 28 Examines What Quantum Inherits From AI
The organizers frame the episode around an inheritance: quantum computing is arriving into institutions, supply chains, and geopolitical formations already shaped by AI. Quantum computers already reach users through the cloud platforms that serve AI, and both technologies now sit inside export-control and supply-chain strategy. That is where Kop's work on the race to quantum first applies, and where decisions taken before 2030 will shape the quantum order.
Davies, Ghose, Kop, and Sloane on One Program
Davies, director of the Beyond Center at Arizona State University, and Ghose, who served on the Advisory Council for Canada's National Quantum Strategy, bring physics and national strategy. Sloane, who has convened Co-Opting AI since 2019, brings the sociology of technology. Kop brings the Stanford RQT scholarship, his War on the Rocks essays, and his advisory work for the U.S. Government, including the Pentagon and the Department of State, on quantum strategy. The session is open to the public and will be recorded for registered viewers.
Prof. Mauritz Kop Brings Quantum Governance to TUM's Public Interest Technology Course With Urs Gasser and Fabienne Marco
On August 24, 2026, Prof. Mauritz Kop taught a Quantum-ELSPI overview at the Technical University of Munich with Urs Gasser and Fabienne Marco, as part of a one-week Public Interest Technology course piloted in TUM's new Data & Society master's program at Gasser's Chair for Public Policy, Governance and Innovative Technology.
Teaching Engineers to Build for the Public Interest
The course took technically trained students through competing understandings of the public interest, digital rights, GovTech, digital public infrastructure, public-interest AI, and democracy, with cases from OpenAI's governance crisis and AlphaFold to Aadhaar, Ushahidi, and vTaiwan, and guest contributors including MacArthur Foundation president John Palfrey. Kop, founder of Stanford RQT and of Quentir, who developed Quantum-ELSPI in a Stanford–Oxford collaboration with Luciano Floridi, added quantum technology as a field where public-interest choices can still shape what gets built, from medicine to security.
Kop, Gasser, and Marco at TUM and XPANSE Abu Dhabi
The session builds on Kop and Gasser's research collaboration, from the 2023 Festival of Ideas at TUM's Raitenhaslach Monastery to their joint publications in Nature Physics and Science, and on their engagements with Marco, who moderated the 2024 XPANSE panel on global quantum governance in Abu Dhabi and whose Quantum Social Lab hosted the 2025 International Quantum Forum in Munich. Further reading connects Kop's quantum governance research with responsible innovation and design justice.
GAO's 2024-2025 Post-Quantum Audit of 24 Federal Agencies, Released 6 October 2026, Finds None Met All Inventory, Funding and Testing Practices Ahead of OMB's 22 October Migration Plans
What GAO-27-108740 found at 24 federal agencies in 2024 and 2025
On 6 October 2026 the U.S. Government Accountability Office released the public version of its audit, conducted from February 2024 to September 2025, of how the 24 Chief Financial Officers Act agencies are preparing to move vulnerable systems to post-quantum cryptography. GAO measured three practices drawn from OMB's November 2022 memo M-23-02: a prioritized inventory of systems with vulnerable cryptography, the funding needed to migrate them, and testing in agency environments. None of the 24 agencies fully addressed all three. One agency had a complete inventory of priority systems, 19 used no automated discovery tools, and no agency had tested post-quantum algorithms in its own environment. Agencies may have moved since; the public report does not say.
Why the $7.1 billion figure needs a second look
OMB gave Congress an estimate of about $7.1 billion to migrate priority federal systems or replace legacy systems that cannot support the new algorithms. GAO reports that 21 agencies acknowledged their funding assessments were not fully accurate and that only one assessment rested on a complete inventory.
Why the timing matters in October 2026
The audit work ended in September 2025, and the public version does not discuss OMB's June 2026 memo M-26-15, whose agency migration plans fall due on 22 October 2026. Unless agencies have closed the gaps since 2025, those plans will rest on inventories GAO found incomplete.
Why Germany's BSI Advises Against Classic McEliece for New Systems, Four Months After ISO Standardized It
What BSI changed in its TR-02102 guidance in October 2026
Germany's Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) now advises against using Classic McEliece for new developments and when planning new cryptographic applications. The change appears on the agency's page for Technical Guideline TR-02102 and was reported by heise on 6 October 2026. BSI states that the 2026 results do not amount to a practical attack on the parameter sets it had recommended; heise adds that correctly built hybrid deployments keep the protection of their classical component. For new post-quantum cryptography projects, BSI points to FrodoKEM, ML-KEM and HQC.
Why two preprints from August and September 2026 moved a national guideline
In August, Ghoshal, Ishai, Jain and Sun posted a quasipolynomial-time method that tells Classic McEliece public keys apart from random ones, covering every parameter set reviewed in the NIST process. In September, Stephen A. Weis of Anthropic cut the cost of the attack's core linear-algebra step to between 2^89 and 2^98 bit operations and described two key-recovery methods. Neither paper breaks a deployed key.
Why a standard and a guideline can now point in different directions
ISO published Classic McEliece in June 2026 in amendment 2 to ISO/IEC 18033-2, the same amendment that standardizes FrodoKEM. A national guideline chooses among standardized options, so a procurement clause that only asks for an ISO-standardized algorithm no longer settles which scheme a supplier may ship.
Quentir Quarterly, Q4 2026: NATO, Genesis Q, The Hague and DOE Put Quantum on a Calendar
Four moves put quantum on a calendar
Four moves put quantum on a calendar this autumn. On 17 September, the Department of Energy announced Genesis Q, a competition of up to $215 million in planned funding, with a $100 million base incentive pool in Phase II for a fault-tolerant machine with at least 100 logical qubits; applications close 19 October. On 25 September, a DOE advisory report proposed 50 to more than 100 logical qubits as targets for 2028. On 29 September, NATO published its Quantum Technology Roadmap, with a Quantum Zero Beacon pilot between Brussels and Mons by the fourth quarter of 2027. And on 5 October, the Dutch government set post-quantum deadlines for its own organizations, running from 2026 to 2035. Below, in three lines each: who it concerns, what was announced, and why it matters.
This is the autumn 2026 issue of Quentir Quarterly, sent to subscribers on 6 October and published here in full. It reads each of the four moves in three lines: who it concerns, what was announced, and why it matters. A short section then reads them together, followed by four recent analyses from the blog and a short tour of what is new on quentir.ai, from Signature Report NO. 4 to the Evidence Registers.
Dutch Quantum Strategy of 5 October 2026: Post-Quantum Deadlines From 2026 to 2035, No QKD, and Police Access to a Code-Breaking Quantum Computer
What the Dutch cabinet sent to parliament on 5 October 2026
Minister Heleen Herbert (Economic Affairs and Climate) and State Secretary Willemijn Aerdts (Digital Economy and Sovereignty) sent the Rijksbrede Quantumstrategie, a government-wide quantum strategy prepared with eight other ministries, to the Tweede Kamer. Its 2035 goals are technological leadership, avoiding dependence on quantum applications from outside the EU, and resilience against security threats. The strategy builds on the 614.9 million euros already granted to Quantum Delta NL and comes with no new budget: actions must fit existing departmental means, and ambitions will be adjusted if the money is not found.
The post-quantum timetable for central government
The security chapter sets a post-quantum cryptography schedule for every central government organization. By the end of 2026, quantum risk sits in risk management and each organization has its own cryptography policy. By the end of 2027, draft migration plans, pilots and budgets follow. By the end of 2028, procurement contracts can demand quantum-safe cryptography. High-risk uses must be migrated by the end of 2030 and medium-risk uses by the end of 2035. The strategy places a possible cryptographically relevant quantum computer between 2029 and 2035 and says the date is uncertain.
Two positions that set the Netherlands apart
Central government does not currently use quantum key distribution for information security, citing objections from several European security agencies. And a separate use case describes quantum decryption of criminal and terrorist communications as an opportunity for police, forensic institutes and intelligence services, which the strategy says should gain access to a quantum computer relatively quickly.
Third Circuit Rules in Thomson Reuters v. ROSS on 29 September 2026: Training a Legal AI on 2,243 Westlaw Headnotes Was Not Fair Use
What the Third Circuit decided on 29 September 2026
In Thomson Reuters v. ROSS Intelligence, No. 25-2153, a Third Circuit panel of Judges Restrepo, Montgomery-Reeves and Bove affirmed partial summary judgment for Thomson Reuters. Judge Montgomery-Reeves wrote the precedential opinion. It holds that 2,243 Westlaw headnotes are original works and that ROSS's use of them to train its AI legal search engine was not fair use under 17 U.S.C. 107. ROSS had commissioned about 25,000 training memos built with the help of the headnotes, and it marketed the finished product as a substitute for Westlaw at comparable prices.
Why the intermediate-copying defense failed
ROSS argued that training is an intermediate step, protected like the code copying in Google v. Oracle, Sega and Connectix. The court read those cases as resting on necessity: copying was the only route to unprotected functional elements. ROSS had free access to the judicial opinions themselves and chose the headnotes because they were easier to use. The court also held that each headnote is a separate work, so every one copied was a whole work taken.
Which market the court protected
On the fourth factor the court found that a market for licensing headnotes as AI training data is rapidly developing, and that ROSS's copying usurped Thomson Reuters's chance to enter it. The opinion addresses a non-generative system and expressly leaves the generative-AI cases, including the pending OpenAI litigation in New York, to their own facts.
Pramila Jayapal's National AI Charter Act Framework of 1 October 2026 Would License AI Companies Like National Banks: How Far the Banking Comparison Holds
What Jayapal proposed on 1 October 2026
Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington released the framework for a National AI Charter Act on 1 October 2026. Every AI company operating in the United States would need a federal charter from a new National AI Charter Authority, funded by charter fees and led by a director. Companies valued at USD 1 billion or more would need a vote of Congress to be chartered, and every charter would need reapproval after ten years. The document is a framework summary, not bill text, and it does not define what counts as an AI company.
Which parts of federal banking law it borrows
The release says the charter is modeled on the national bank charter: continuous federal supervision, safety mandates and a wall between the regulated business and the rest of commerce. Three features of federal banking law line up with it: examiners under 12 U.S.C. 481, limits on bank holding companies owning nonbanking firms under 12 U.S.C. 1843, and charter forfeiture for violations of law under 12 U.S.C. 24.
Where it goes further than banking law
National bank charters have no ten-year expiry, and Congress does not vote on individual banks. The AI framework adds both, together with pre-release testing in government facilities, an inspector-triggered kill switch, bans on whole categories of capability and a condition that companies recognize unions.
California SB 574 (Chapter 858), Signed 30 September 2026, Sets Generative AI Duties for Lawyers, Court Filings and Arbitrators From 1 January 2027
What Governor Newsom signed on 30 September 2026
California Senate Bill 574, by Senator Thomas Umberg, became Chapter 858 of the Statutes of 2026 when the Governor approved it on 30 September 2026. It is a short statute with four working parts. A new section 6068.1 of the Business and Professions Code forbids an attorney to delegate the practice of law to generative AI and sets the conditions for using it: no confidential or personal identifying information in tools whose access is not restricted to the attorney and persons the attorney has authorized under confidentiality obligations, reasonable steps to verify every output and every case and statutory citation, and disclosure of generative AI use to the court for documents submitted to it. An amended Code of Civil Procedure section 128.7 provides that a brief, pleading, motion or other paper filed in court may not contain a citation the responsible attorney has not personally verified; under subdivision (g), section 128.7 does not apply to discovery papers.
Why arbitrators and the State Bar are in the same bill
A new section 1282.1 forbids an arbitrator to delegate any part of the decision to a generative AI tool, and the Judicial Council must revisit its standard on judges' use of the technology. Read together, the provisions make generative AI in legal practice a question of professional duty enforced through discipline and sanctions, with citation verification as the test every litigator will meet first. Absent an urgency clause, the law takes effect on 1 January 2027. This post reads the chaptered text section by section and asks what it changes for clients, patients, courts and the vendors who sell AI tools to law firms.