Anthropic’s Leaked Code Tests Copyright Challenges in A.I. Era; The New York Times, April 22, 2026

  Meaghan Tobin, The New York Times; Anthropic’s Leaked Code Tests Copyright Challenges in A.I. Era

Artificial intelligence tools are making it faster than ever to reproduce creative work. Does copyright even matter anymore?

"Sigrid Jin was waiting to board a plane when he saw stunning news that artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic had accidentally leaked the source code for Claude Code, its popular A.I. agent. Mr. Jin, 25, an undergraduate student, scrambled to post a copy online. His worried girlfriend quickly texted him: Was he violating copyright law?

Mr. Jin turned to a team of A.I. assistants for a solution. He directed them to rewrite the leaked code in another programming language, then shared that version online. Within hours, more than 100,000 people had liked or linked to it.

Anthropic, one of the leading A.I. companies alongside OpenAI, has said the leak had been caused by human error and, citing copyright violations, demanded that GitHub, an online library of computer code, remove posts sharing the code. Thousands of posts were taken down. But Mr. Jin’s version remains online. He said Anthropic had not asked him to take it down.

It is unclear whether Anthropic, which did not respond to questions from The New York Times, is drawing a distinction with the rewritten code. Mr. Jin said he believed rewriting the code transformed it into a new work, one that Anthropic could not claim ownership over.

He said he was driven less by money or fame than by a desire to make a broader philosophical point. What is the value of copyrighted intellectual property in an era when A.I. can easily replicate not just computer code but art, music and literature in minutes?

“I just wanted to raise some ethical questions in the A.I. agent era,” he said. “Any creative work can be reproduced in a second.”"

Big Law’s Big Choice; The Bulwark, November 4, 2025

  PAUL ROSENZWEIG, The Bulwark; Big Law’s Big Choice

"When nine Big Law firms settled with Donald Trump (or, perhaps more accurately, cravenly “caved” to him), they probably thought that discretion was the better part of valor. Why fight with the big dog when the fight will only hurt, and when there is no apparent downside to surrender?

The downside has now become apparent. As reported in the New York Times, the District of Columbia Bar Legal Ethics Committee recently issued an opinion calling into grave question the ethical appropriateness of Big Law’s settlements with Trump.

Though the opinion does not mention Trump by name, the upshot of the opinion is that the big law firms that settled with him have to address significant ethical questions. Taken seriously, this opinion is a quiet earthquake that might shake the foundations of several law firms both because it says that what the law firms have done may have violated the Rules of Professional Conduct and because it also suggests that their violations cannot be cured without rescinding their agreements with Trump."

At the Intersection of A.I. and Spirituality; The New York Times, January 3, 2025

 Eli Tan, The New York Times; At the Intersection of A.I. and Spirituality

"For centuries, new technologies have changed the ways people worship, from the radio in the 1920s to television sets in the 1950s and the internet in the 1990s. Some proponents of A.I. in religious spaces have gone back even further, comparing A.I.’s potential — and fears of it — to the invention of the printing press in the 15th century.

Religious leaders have used A.I. to translate their livestreamed sermons into different languages in real time, blasting them out to international audiences. Others have compared chatbots trained on tens of thousands of pages of Scripture to a fleet of newly trained seminary students, able to pull excerpts about certain topics nearly instantaneously.

But the ethical questions around using generative A.I. for religious tasks have become more complicated as the technology has improved, religious leaders say. While most agree that using A.I. for tasks like research or marketing is acceptable, other uses for the technology, like sermon writing, are seen by some as a step too far."

5 Underrated Films About AI Ethics Every Tech Leader Should Watch; Forbes, November 26, 2024

 Bruce Weinstein, Ph.D., Forbes ; 5 Underrated Films About AI Ethics Every Tech Leader Should Watch

"If you’’re a tech leader—and even if you’re not—you owe it to yourself to watch at least a couple of the films on this list. Each raises profound ethical questions and are gripping to boot.

So here are 5 lesser-known works of cinema waiting for you online or on old-fashioned DVD or Blu-Ray discs. For each film I’m including:

• a reference to an ethical question raised by the film
• a reference for digging more deeply into the film’s ethical issues
• The Rotten Tomatoes rating at the time of this article’s publication
• where to watch"