Snorkel AI, a company that builds AI training data sets and simulated environments, closed a $350 million Series E at a $3.5 billion valuation, nearly triple its $1.3 billion valuation from 17 months earlier. The round included existing backers Addition, Lightspeed, Greylock, GV, and Wells Fargo, alongside new leads Insight Partners and S32. Snorkel reports an annualized revenue run-rate of $375 million, up 18-fold over the past year.
techcrunch.com
· 2026-09-22
Court documents made public in an ongoing copyright lawsuit reveal internal OpenAI communications in which employees discussed the expense and legality of acquiring books to train early ChatGPT models, with some staff flagging the sourcing as questionable. The messages suggest teams weighed pirated material as a cheaper alternative to licensing content properly.
wsj.com
· 2026-09-19
Newly unredacted court documents from copyright lawsuits against OpenAI and Microsoft reveal internal comments from executives acknowledging that scraping published journalism to train chatbots amounted to theft on a massive scale. Microsoft's Brent Hecht reportedly described it as possibly 'the largest theft of labor in human history,' while an OpenAI executive warned that products like ChatGPT posed an 'existential threat' to publishers.
cnet.com
· 2026-09-18
Cloudflare launched a 'Disallow AI Training' control that lets website owners stay visible in search results while blocking the same crawler from using their content to train AI models. Apple, Google and Microsoft have agreed to honor the new setting, which addresses the problem of mixed-use crawlers that previously forced sites to accept both search indexing and AI training together or neither.
blog.cloudflare.com
· 2026-09-16
Sony Music and Warner have filed a copyright lawsuit against Anthropic, alleging the AI company scraped and used their song catalogs without permission to train its models. This follows a similar suit from Universal Music Group in January, meaning all three major music publishers are now pursuing legal action against Anthropic.
fastcompany.com
· 2026-09-11
Meta piloted a Model Capability Initiative that would have captured employees' keystrokes and mouse movements to help train its AI models. Workers pushed back quickly, circulating an internal petition, and the program was ultimately shelved after concerns about privacy and a reported data breach.
fastcompany.com
· 2026-09-11
Microsoft and the American Federation of Teachers signed a legally enforceable agreement barring the company from using student or teacher data to train its AI models, except in narrow safety and security cases. The deal also prohibits tracking students, requires human oversight for any AI decisions affecting schools, and mandates transparency with parents and educators about how the tools function. Protections take effect for school districts starting November 1.
engadget.com
· 2026-09-09
Microsoft submitted 8.2 million Copilot chat logs as part of discovery in copyright suits from The New York Times, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and book authors. The company says only 59,545 logs shared at least 16 words with plaintiffs' news content, with far fewer showing substantial text overlap, and just 10 of 212 books evaluated had any matching passages.
theverge.com
· 2026-09-04
The University of Chicago's Booth School of Business has introduced a 10-month, primarily online program aimed at preparing executives for chief AI officer roles, priced at $28,000 per student with early-bird discounts. The curriculum spans six modules covering AI readiness assessment, business opportunity identification, governance frameworks, and enterprise-wide deployment strategies. Applications are open for the next cohort starting September 28.
techspot.com
· 2026-08-25
A class action lawsuit filed by Connecticut streamer Warren Pandiscia accuses Amazon of using Twitch users' broadcasts to train its AI models without consent or compensation. The suit claims this violates Twitch's contract with streamers, who collectively produced over 215 million hours of content in early 2026 alone. It seeks damages plus a court order to stop Amazon from continuing the practice.
bbc.co.uk
· 2026-08-24
Connecticut-based streamer Warren Pandiscia has filed a class action lawsuit against Twitch and Amazon, alleging the companies used his streams and videos to train AI models without licensing or consent. The suit follows Twitch's recent rollout of an opt-out (rather than opt-in) setting for AI training use of channel content, with a Twitch executive admitting few users would opt in if given the choice upfront.
engadget.com
· 2026-08-23
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