Recent Cases
Gagleard v. Perplexity AI, Inc.
Why It Matters: A civil complaint against Perplexity AI directly implicates the unresolved question of whether AI-generated search summaries and answer-engine outputs constitute content "provided by another information content provider" under Section 230(c)(1) — or whether the AI developer is itself the information content provider, stripping it of immunity and exposing it to tort liability. Depending on the theories pleaded, this case could also engage the Garcia v. Character Technologies framework on AI product liability and the contested question of whether AI-generated output constitutes protected speech under the First Amendment.
View on CourtListener →Why It Matters: Perplexity AI is a named defendant and a high-priority technology actor in the AI liability space, triggering presumptive relevance under the strong positive signal rule; depending on the underlying allegations, this case could implicate AI speech tort liability (e.g., hallucinated defamatory outputs), product liability theories, or Section 230 immunity questions — all of which are actively contested frontier issues — but the absence of complaint text makes substantive classification impossible at this stage and warrants human review to assess the actual theories pleaded.
View on CourtListener →Students v. Paxton
Issue: In *Students v. Paxton*, the student and minor Appellees argue that Texas SB 2420 — the "App Store Accountability Act," which requires age verification, parental identification, and parental consent before minors may download apps — unconstitutionally conditions access to fully First Amendment–protected expressive content on government-mandated preclearance. The question is whether that consent-gating architecture is structurally equivalent to the categorical sales ban the Supreme Court struck down in *Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Ass'n* (2011), or whether the existence of a parental-bypass pathway renders the scheme constitutionally distinct. The case also raises whether SB 2420's selective exemptions for emergency-service nonprofits and standardized-test apps independently trigger strict scrutiny as content-based discrimination under *Reed v. Town of Gilbert*.
Why It Matters: This brief pushes for a doctrinal bridge that no federal circuit has yet constructed: that *Brown*'s categorical prohibition on restricting minors' access to fully protected expressive content applies with equal force to consent-gating regimes, not merely to outright sales bans — an extension with direct implications for similar app-access legislation pending or enacted in Florida, Utah, Louisiana, and elsewhere. If the Fifth Circuit credits the layered prior-restraint theory, it would establish that any classification-and-gating regime applied to expressive app content is a prior restraint regardless of whether a parental-bypass pathway exists, meaningfully constraining the architecture available to states across the country. The brief's effort to cabin *Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton* to the obscene-as-to-minors category is the most consequential framing at stake: if accepted, it substantially limits that recent Supreme Court decision as a template for broad platform-access legislation; if rejected, it could open the door to a more deferential standard of review that reshapes how courts evaluate the next generation of state digital-safety laws.
View on CourtListener →Computer & Communications Industry Association v. Ken Paxton
Issue: In *Computer & Communications Industry Association v. Paxton*, CCIA argues that Texas SB2420—a law requiring mobile app stores to verify users' ages and obtain parental consent before minors can download apps—unconstitutionally burdens First Amendment-protected speech by restricting access to an entire ecosystem of expressive content, from news and religious apps to audiobooks and educational tools. The central legal question is whether a state may impose a universal age-verification and parental-consent regime on app distribution without targeting specifically harmful content and without submitting evidence that the mandate actually serves its stated purpose of protecting minors.
Why It Matters: This appeal will help define whether states can impose age-verification regimes on digital distribution infrastructure—not just on platforms hosting adult content, but on the gatekeepers through which virtually all mobile software reaches users—and what evidentiary burden the government must meet to justify such laws. The case tests whether the commercial nature of app store transactions insulates a law from strict First Amendment scrutiny, a question left open by *Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Ass'n* and actively contested across ongoing platform-regulation litigation. The Fifth Circuit's resolution will also clarify how *Trump v. CASA*'s skepticism toward universal injunctions applies when a plaintiff association challenges a law facially, a question with broad consequences for how constitutional challenges to social-media and technology statutes are litigated going forward.
View on CourtListener →Anthropic PBC v. U.S. Department of War
Why It Matters: The proposed "expressive intermediary" framework is the brief's most significant doctrinal contribution: if adopted, it would substantially constrain Executive Branch flexibility to impose use-case conditions on AI vendors as a matter of procurement policy, extending the major-questions canon into First Amendment coercion doctrine in a way no appellate court has yet done. The indirect-coercion argument under *Vullo* is more conventionally grounded but still represents a meaningful extension, as *Vullo* itself did not address the government's broad contracting authority or national-security procurement contexts. The brief's central weakness—one worth watching as the government prepares its opposition—is its complete silence on *Rust v. Sullivan* and the government's likely argument that supply-chain risk conditions in AI-weapons procurement reflect genuinely viewpoint-neutral national-security equities, a gap that could prove decisive at summary judgment.
View on CourtListener →Why It Matters: The federal government has increasingly used procurement leverage and supply chain designation authority as tools of industrial and ideological policy, and this brief argues that when a company's publicly stated values — rather than a genuine security threat — drive such a designation, the First Amendment is triggered and the government loses. If the court accepts the amici's framing, it would be the first ruling to squarely hold that AI model safety architecture is constitutionally protected expression, creating a significant structural limit on the government's ability to use contract conditions to compel AI companies to build less cautious or differently aligned systems. For non-specialists, the core question is whether the Constitution forbids the government from telling an AI company "change how your AI thinks or lose all your federal contracts." The most closely watched doctrinal uncertainty is whether *Moody* and *NetChoice* — both of which addressed platforms *curating* pre-existing third-party content — extend to a model that *generates* outputs through training, a distinction no circuit court has yet resolved. The outcome could also determine whether retaliation doctrine places meaningful limits on the executive branch's use of national security procurement tools as instruments of pressure against private technology companies.
View on CourtListener →Why It Matters: This filing maps the most actively contested doctrinal fault line in the social-media MDL: whether Section 230 immunity can reach a platform's own affirmative misrepresentations when those statements concern how the platform manages third-party content, and whether that immunity argument can be revived at the in limine stage after lying dormant through dismissal and summary judgment. The AGs' reading of *Bride* and *Grindr* — confining those decisions to publisher-role claims — is doctrinally significant but contested; if Meta persuades the court that misrepresentations about content moderation are inherently representations about third-party content handling, a substantial category of deception-based claims could be imperiled. The procedural forfeiture theory, if credited, would be a notable development in MDL practice, signaling that Section 230 must be raised and preserved at the dispositive-motion stage or risk being treated as waived. A ruling on this motion — in either direction — is likely to produce Ninth Circuit guidance that will either solidify the misrepresentation carve-out as a clean doctrinal category or begin to erode it where editorial and deceptive conduct are intertwined.
View on CourtListener →Why It Matters: This brief is a significant pre-trial marker in one of the highest-stakes social media liability cases currently in active litigation, because it attempts to establish at the evidentiary level — not merely the pleading level — that internal corporate documents about design alternatives are fully accessible to plaintiffs at trial regardless of any residual Section 230 argument. If the court denies Meta's motion and admits this evidence, it will confirm that state AG consumer protection claims can reach deep into a platform's internal deliberations, and it will consolidate a procedural norm — that a pleading-stage Section 230 ruling forecloses iterative revival of the defense at later stages — with potentially broad consequences across the MDL and for other platform defendants. The "soft-matching" willful-blindness theory is separately worth watching: by framing the harm as deliberate technological underperformance in age verification rather than exposure to any particular content, Plaintiffs present a theory of COPPA-adjacent liability that does not implicate Section 230 at all, and its acceptance or rejection could shape how state unfairness claims are litigated against platforms going forward.
View on CourtListener →Why It Matters: State attorneys general are suing Meta for allegedly deceiving the public about social media's harms to teenagers, and Meta is attempting to block former employee testimony — including apparent whistleblower accounts — by invoking Section 230, a federal statute designed to shield platforms from liability for content posted by their users. The AGs are pressing a meaningful procedural extension of existing doctrine: if Section 230 does not bar the underlying deception claims at the pleadings or summary judgment stage, they argue, it cannot bar the evidence that proves those claims at trial — translating the "platform's own conduct" carve-out from claim viability into the admissibility context, a step courts have rarely been asked to take explicitly. Whether the court accepts that argument or not, the ruling on this motion will signal how broadly Section 230 can be wielded as an evidentiary tool in MDL proceedings with mixed claim portfolios, where some claims survive the immunity and others do not. A second question worth watching is where the line falls under FRE 701 between a former employee's direct observations about institutional culture and inadmissible opinion testimony about organizational intent — an area where circuit-level authority remains thin.
View on CourtListener →Defense Distributed v. Elik
Issue: In *Defense Distributed v. Elik*, Defense Distributed argues that a court may take judicial notice of prior federal court orders from related litigation—including orders in *VanDerStok* and proceedings against YouTube and Kickstarter—not merely as proof those proceedings occurred, but as independent corroboration that its lost-sales harm is credible and non-speculative. The non-obvious difficulty is that FRE 201 permits judicial notice of adjudicative facts not subject to reasonable dispute, and Defense Distributed is pressing that standard to cover something courts have traditionally refused to notice: the persuasive force of factual findings and credibility assessments made by other judges in factually distinct cases.
Why It Matters: Defense Distributed is attempting to protect its damages case and its experts from exclusion before trial by aggregating judicial acknowledgments of financial harm from factually adjacent but legally distinct proceedings—a strategically creative but doctrinally contested move. The core legal problem is that courts routinely take notice of the existence and contents of prior proceedings but not of the truth of facts found or credibility judgments made in them, a distinction that could leave Defense Distributed's experts without the cross-forum corroboration the motion is designed to provide. If the motion fails on those grounds, the company's damages case may rest entirely on its own internal representations, making its experts more vulnerable to exclusion under *Daubert*. The motion also surfaces a broader question that circuit courts have not squarely resolved: whether a commercial tort plaintiff can build a Daubert-resistant damages record by aggregating judicial acknowledgments of harm from multiple related but legally distinct proceedings.
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.