US Department of Justice

Headlines · 4

1. 6d
   US backs OpenAI fair use but calls Chinese model distillation a threat

   In September 2026 the US government took two opposing positions on AI data use. On Sept 1 the Department of Justice filed a statement of interest in the Southern District of New York backing OpenAI in copyright suits brought by The New York Times and other publishers, arguing that training models on copyrighted text is highly transformative fair use and that requiring licenses would be unacceptable. On Sept 8, the NSA, CISA and FBI issued a joint cybersecurity advisory saying six Chinese firms used APIs to distill US frontier models such as Claude and GPT, extracting billions of tokens, and labeled it malicious, targeted capability theft. The article argues training and distillation are technically kindred: both use existing corpora without individual authorization, both yield new parameters rather than copies, and both may substitute for the original market — differing mainly in whether the material learned from is human work or machine output.

   虎嗅 AI · 🔥 0
2. Oct 9
   Super Micro case ‘fixer’ pleads guilty to diverting Nvidia AI servers to China

   Ting-Wei “Willy” Sun, a broker charged alongside Super Micro co-founder Yih-Shyan “Wally” Liaw and Taiwan sales manager Ruei-Tsang “Steven” Chang, pleaded guilty in Manhattan federal court on Oct. 8 to conspiring to violate US export controls, according to Bloomberg and other outlets. Prosecutors say the group shipped Nvidia-powered servers to a Southeast Asian company and diverted them to China, falsifying records and building “dummy” servers — with serial numbers moved using a hair dryer — to fool auditors, in a scheme involving about $2.5bn of US AI technology including B200, H100 and H200 chips. Sun is due to be sentenced in September 2027; Liaw has pleaded not guilty and left the board, Chang remains at large, and Super Micro itself is not a defendant and says current leaders were unaware of the scheme.

   Bloomberg Technology · 🔥 0
3. Oct 8
   Third Circuit: ROSS training AI on Westlaw headnotes is not fair use

   On September 29, 2026, the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit upheld partial summary judgment in Thomson Reuters v. ROSS, ruling that Westlaw's headnotes are original, copyright-protected content and that ROSS's use of them to train its AI legal research tool was not fair use. It is the first federal appellate ruling on fair use in AI training, but the court distinguished the case's non-generative tool from generative-AI cases such as Bartz v. Anthropic and In re: OpenAI, calling it an ordinary copyright case. With ROSS shut down, the dispute may never reach the Supreme Court, making this a likely final ruling in the six-year case.

   虎嗅 AI · 🔥 0
4. Oct 7
   AI music streaming fraudster gets 18 months, must forfeit $8M

   The US Department of Justice said Michael Smith of Cornelius, North Carolina, was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison and ordered to forfeit $8,091,843.64 for using AI-generated songs and automated bot accounts to fraudulently collect streaming royalties. Prosecutors said he and co-conspirators uploaded hundreds of thousands of AI-made tracks between 2017 and 2024, using fake emails, fraudulently obtained debit cards, VPNs and playback software to generate billions of plays on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube Music. The DOJ called it its first prosecution of AI-assisted music streaming fraud; the court noted that in April 2023 his tracks drew 80.9 million YouTube Music family-plan streams, versus 9.3 million for Taylor Swift's entire catalog that month.

   IT之家 AI · 🔥 0

Experience and discussion from the community

Share my US Department of Justice experienceAsk about US Department of Justice