Recent Cases
Anthropic PBC v. U.S. Department of War
Issue: In *Anthropic PBC v. U.S. Department of War*, the Faith Family Technology Network argues that the federal government may not penalize a private AI company for refusing, on moral and religious grounds, to make its technology available for autonomous lethal weapons systems and mass surveillance programs. The brief raises the non-obvious question of whether a corporate entity's product-use restrictions — embedded in a commercial AI platform rather than an individual's expressive service — can qualify as protected speech and religious exercise under the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The case also asks whether a government supply-chain risk designation that effectively excludes a company from federal procurement markets constitutes an unconstitutional condition on the abandonment of protected moral and religious positions.
Why It Matters: This brief is worth watching because it asks courts to extend *303 Creative*'s compelled-speech protection — designed for an individual sole proprietor's custom expressive services — to a large corporate entity's standardized AI product-use restrictions, a doctrinal step no circuit court has clearly authorized and one that could significantly reshape how First Amendment and RFRA protections apply to AI developers at scale. The RFRA argument is also novel in posture: applying the substantial-burden framework to a government procurement exclusion rather than a traditional licensing or benefits condition tests the outer boundary of *Hobby Lobby*'s already expansive reading of corporate religious exercise. If any court were to accept these arguments, it would create a powerful new legal tool for technology companies seeking to resist government compulsion to deploy their products for military or surveillance purposes — with implications reaching well beyond this case.
View on CourtListener →Grybniak v. X. AI LLC
Issue: In *Grybniak v. X.AI LLC*, Plaintiff Sergii Grybniak argues that X.AI LLC's "Grok" chatbot committed defamation by generating outputs stating he "committed securities fraud," when the underlying February 2025 federal consent judgment resolved the SEC matter exclusively under negligence-based, non-scienter provisions on a no-admission basis. The case presses a further question: because Grok synthesizes and originates its responses rather than hosting text written by users, whether X.AI is the author of those statements — not a passive intermediary — such that Section 230's immunity defense is unavailable from the outset.
Why It Matters: This case is an early stress-test of whether Section 230 — enacted in 1996 to protect bulletin-board hosts from liability for user-submitted posts — can be extended to shield AI companies when their own software generates and publishes defamatory statements about real people. If courts accept the argument that Grok is the author of its outputs rather than a conduit for third-party content, the "another information content provider" element at the heart of Section 230 immunity would be unsatisfied, a result that would affect every company deploying large language models in consumer-facing products. The complaint also surfaces two additional unresolved questions that the first wave of AI-defamation litigation will eventually force courts to answer: whether the *New York Times v. Sullivan* actual-malice standard can be met through systemic behavioral evidence such as cross-prompt inconsistency, and whether continued AI-generated publication after particularized correction notices triggers a fresh republication for damages and limitations purposes.
View on CourtListener →NetChoice v. Hilgers
Issue: In *NetChoice v. Hilgers*, the State of Iowa and 25 co-amici argue that Nebraska's Parental Rights in Social Media Act — which requires parental consent before platforms may create accounts for minors — regulates a commercial contracting transaction rather than speech, and therefore triggers no First Amendment scrutiny at all. Even if scrutiny applies, the amici contend that NetChoice cannot satisfy the demanding facial-overbreadth standard established in *Moody v. NetChoice*, 603 U.S. 707 (2024), because the Act has plainly constitutional applications to young children that NetChoice has made no showing to overcome. A separate threshold question is whether NetChoice can stack associational standing on top of third-party standing to assert the constitutional rights of platform users who are strangers to the association.
Why It Matters: This brief is a coordinated state-AG effort to translate *Moody v. NetChoice* into an early-stage litigation shield — pressing courts to deny preliminary injunctions against minor-protection statutes before plaintiffs can build a full record of unconstitutional applications, a theory the Fifth Circuit has now endorsed and which the Eighth Circuit has not yet addressed in this posture. The "commercial transaction" framing is the most aggressive doctrinal move: if courts accept that account-creation regulation is categorically outside the First Amendment, states could gate nearly any platform interaction on consent requirements without triggering scrutiny, a line no court has yet drawn clearly. The derivative-standing argument presents a genuine structural question that could cut off facial challenges to state social-media laws at the threshold, independent of the merits, and its resolution in the Eighth Circuit would carry significant weight in parallel litigation across the country. Readers should note, however, that amici's reliance on *TikTok v. Garland* overstates a holding the Supreme Court expressly left open, and that the "young children" defense does not answer the harder constitutional question the Act raises for 16- and 17-year-olds.
View on CourtListener →Grybniak v. Google LLC
Issue: In *Grybniak v. Google LLC*, pro se plaintiff Sergii Grybniak argues that Google is liable as a first-party publisher — not a passive conduit — for Google Gemini outputs that repeatedly characterized him as having "committed fraud" in a securities offering, when the underlying SEC matter resolved on a no-admission basis under non-scienter, non-fraud provisions. The claim turns on whether an AI system's synthesized statements constitute the platform's own speech (placing the claim outside § 230 immunity), and whether Gemini's documented acknowledgment of its own inaccuracy, combined with continued false outputs, satisfies the actual malice standard for defamation.
Why It Matters: This case is one of the first to test whether statements generated by an AI chatbot constitute the platform's own speech for § 230 purposes — a question no circuit court has yet answered for large language model outputs — and whether the absence of a human third-party author means the "another information content provider" element of § 230 immunity is structurally unavailable to the developer. The actual malice framing is particularly novel: if a court were to credit an AI system's in-session acknowledgment of its own inaccuracy as evidence of the platform's subjective awareness of probable falsity, it would meaningfully extend the *St. Amant v. Thompson* recklessness standard into AI publishing. The complaint also surfaces a broader harm-tracing concern — government agencies relying on AI-generated summaries of regulatory history rather than the underlying record — that could prove significant in AI defamation litigation well beyond this case.
View on CourtListener →Uber Technologies, Inc. v. City Of New York
Issue: In *Uber Technologies, Inc. v. City of New York*, Uber argues that NYC Local Law 52 of 2026—which limits rideshare platforms to three permissible grounds for driver deactivation, mandates advance notice and written explanations, compels disclosure of rider complaints and aggregate data, and retroactively reviews deactivations back to 2019—violates the Contracts Clause, the First Amendment, and the Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses of the federal Constitution. The case raises genuinely unsettled questions about whether standardized platform-access agreements qualify as contracts deserving robust Contracts Clause protection, and whether government-mandated disclosures of rider complaint data constitute compelled speech or merely permissible commercial disclosure regulation.
Why It Matters: This complaint tests whether cities can impose employment-law-style just-cause protections on gig-economy platforms without running afoul of constitutional limits on contract impairment—a question with significant implications for how municipalities nationwide regulate platform-worker relationships. The Contracts Clause theory, while facially colorable given the PAA's express deactivation provisions, will likely face substantial headwinds at the merits stage because courts apply meaningful deference to economic regulation serving a legitimate public interest, and adhesion-style platform terms may not command the same protection as fully negotiated commercial contracts. The compelled-speech claim is the most doctrinally generative theory in the complaint, because the line between permissible factual-disclosure mandates under *Zauderer* and more demanding First Amendment scrutiny under *NIFLA v. Becerra* remains unsettled in the platform-regulation context. How the court resolves the scope of Contracts Clause protection for platform-access agreements—and whether mandatory deactivation-data disclosure survives First Amendment review—could shape the constitutional floor for gig-economy labor regulation well beyond New York City.
View on CourtListener →Why It Matters: This motion presents a consequential and underexplored question about whether Section 230's immunity extends to evidentiary proceedings — specifically, whether the statute can be used to exclude testimony that would characterize a platform's internal decisions as publisher or editorial choices, potentially expanding Section 230's reach beyond its traditional role as a liability bar into a trial-stage evidentiary doctrine. The outcome could affect how government plaintiffs in the wave of state AG and AG-parallel cases against Meta are able to introduce internal evidence of platform design and moderation decisions at trial.
View on CourtListener →Why It Matters: This motion represents a notable and relatively rare invocation of Section 230 as a trial-stage evidentiary bar rather than a pleading-stage immunity defense, testing whether §230 can preclude entire categories of evidence concerning platform policy choices — a question with significant implications for how government enforcement actions against platforms can be litigated. The outcome could clarify the extent to which Section 230's publisher immunity principle constrains not just liability theories but the evidentiary record in public-enforcement cases brought by state attorneys general.
View on CourtListener →Why It Matters: These motions present a significant and relatively rare trial-stage application of Section 230 as an evidentiary bar in a state attorney general enforcement action, directly testing the scope of Section 230 immunity against failure-to-warn, misrepresentation, and unfair business practices claims premised on Meta's publishing decisions and platform design — an important front in the ongoing litigation over whether Section 230 shields platform design choices and moderation policies from state consumer protection enforcement.
View on CourtListener →IN RE: SOCIAL MEDIA ADOLESCENT ADDICTION/PERSONAL INJURY PRODUCTS LIABILITY LITIGATION
Why It Matters: Meta's decision to introduce this transcript as its own exhibit while seeking to seal it is the central strategic puzzle: the company appears to be attempting to manage how damaging insider testimony enters the federal record rather than allowing plaintiffs to introduce it on their own terms and framing. The sealing request is legally vulnerable under *Kamakana v. City & County of Honolulu* because the testimony comes from an open state-court trial and carries a strong presumption of public access, particularly where the underlying MIL bears meaningfully on the scope of trial. If the court denies sealing and resolves the MIL against Meta, Boland's acknowledged combination of documented internal knowledge of predictable harm pathways, the suppression of that knowledge, and the direct revenue linkage to the contested algorithmic design could substantially strengthen plaintiffs' corporate-knowledge, concealment, and punitive damages theories across the MDL.
View on CourtListener →Why It Matters: Meta is attempting something more aggressive than a typical motion in limine: it wants a prior legal ruling that it cannot be held liable for certain features to also mean that witnesses cannot testify about those features at trial — the difference between a court saying "you cannot win on that theory" and saying "the jury cannot hear about it at all." If the court accepts this theory, it could substantially narrow the plaintiffs' trial presentation on core design-defect claims that survived the motion-to-dismiss stage, because the platform features at issue are the same ones underlying the surviving theories. No circuit court appears to have squarely endorsed using a Section 230 immunity ruling as a prospective evidentiary exclusion, making Judge Gonzalez Rogers's ruling on this question potentially the first of its kind in a major platform-liability MDL — and a significant marker for how Section 230 doctrine functions once a case reaches trial.
View on CourtListener →Recent Commentary
When a platform's generative AI tool creates new content rather than merely hosting or amplifying third-party content, the platform may lose Section 230 immunity as an information content provider—a significant and unresolved doctrinal question for AI-enhanced advertising and beyond.
The deliberate design choice to personify AI systems is both a source of user harm and a liability-deflecting strategy that courts and regulators should scrutinize under product design and failure-to-warn frameworks.
The Ohio appellate court held that Google's search results are its own expressive product—not the unaltered carriage of third-party content—foreclosing common-carrier regulation and affirming broad First Amendment protection for search engine editorial discretion.
The Fifth Circuit's classification of app store listings as commercial speech subject to intermediate scrutiny — rather than protected editorial curation subject to strict scrutiny under Moody v. NetChoice — represents a significant and arguably erroneous departure from controlling First Amendment doctrine governing platform content distribution.
The Copia Institute's amicus argues that Louisiana's age-verification law is unconstitutional because conditioning platform access on identity disclosure destroys the First Amendment right to anonymous speech for all users, not just minors, and that the Fifth Circuit's repeated failure to apply controlling Supreme Court precedent in this space demands correction.