federal civil courts 17% of people represented themselves in 2025, up from a steady 11% for many years before, according to research by Anand Shah of MIT and Joshua Levy of the University of Southern California. They also find that this year 18% of complaints have probably contained AI-generated text. Courtready, a legal-tech platform, reports that Canadian courts have flagged non-existent cases in 79 rulings so far this year, against seven in all of 2024. Most false citations have been made by people representing themselves. As well as inventing cases, AI chatbots often encourage people to litigate, urge them not to settle and overstate their chances of winning. Antony Sendall, a British employment barrister, says chatbots embolden litigants to bring discrimination claims. “A grievance that would have been a few sentences is now more like ten to 12 pages,” he complains. Messrs Shah and Levy found that in cases with self-representing litigants in America, the number of documents filed in the first 180 days is 158% higher than in the pre-AI era. Robert Freund, a commercial lawyer in Los Angeles, says his clients receive correspondence and documents written by AI from opposing parties acting without lawyers. And relying on AI can prove expensive. On June 2nd a student was ordered to pay the University of Ottawa C$10,000 ($7,000), partly for using AI improperly to prepare her legal challenge against her removal from a PhD programme. Even lawyers have been caught out. In April Sullivan & Cromwell, a top New York firm, apologised to a court for errors caused by AI hallucinations. On June 8th lawyers on both sides of a contractual dispute in Mississippi were fined for citing fabricated cases. Some believe that AI labs should bear responsibility for their models’ inventions. In March Nippon Life, an insurer, sued OpenAI in a federal court in Chicago, alleging that ChatGPT had enabled an ex-employee to make what it says is a meritless discrimination claim. Nippon is seeking $10m in punitive damages; OpenAI insists that ChatGPT is “not a lawyer”. Used with caution, AI can be beneficial. In London on May 14th Tamires Camal Taquidir, a human-resources consultant, recovered £7,000 ($9,300) in fees from a hospitality firm after engaging Garfield AI, which calls itself the world’s first AI-powered law firm approved by regulators. Garfield’s
platform did the documentary heavy lifting. But Dominic Li, a barrister, argued the case in court. For now, human lawyers still have their place. ■ To track the trends shaping commerce, industry and technology, sign up to “The Bottom Line”, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter on global business. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//business/2026/06/29/the-rise-of-vibe-lawyering
Donald Trump’s AI regime is opaque, unpredictable—and unsustainable The administration now controls who gets access to the best models July 2nd 2026 AMERICAN LIFE is full of things that are billed as voluntary but turn out not to be. Tipping. Joining the local parent-teacher association. And now getting permission to release your cutting-edge artificial-intelligence model to the world. On June 26th OpenAI said that its newest model, GPT-5.6 Sol, would be restricted to a handful of “trusted partners”. The same day, America’s government eased export controls on Mythos 5, another advanced model from Anthropic, a competing lab, and lifted them entirely on June 30th. All of this marks a haphazard revolution in America’s governance of AI. “In a matter of weeks”, observes Dean Ball, a former AI adviser in the Trump
administration, “US federal AI policy has gone from implausibly libertarian to increasingly draconian and opaque.” The Trump administration assumed office railing against regulation, which it feared would suffocate innovation and allow China to catch up. “The AI future is not going to be won by hand-wringing about safety,” declared J.D. Vance, the vice-president, at a summit in Paris last year. As recently as June 2nd Donald Trump issued an executive order on AI governance that asked frontier labs for early access to new models and co-operation on cyber risks —both of which were happening anyway. The White House insisted that nothing in the order was to be construed as “a mandatory governmental licensing, preclearance or permitting requirement”. In practice, that is exactly what now exists. Between June 26th and June 30th, when the restrictions were eased, Anthropic was permitted to share Mythos with only 100 or so American firms and institutions, as well as their foreign-national employees. The publicly available version, Fable 5, is still heavily constrained. Sam Altman, the boss of OpenAI, was called by Howard Lutnick, America’s commerce secretary, last week, warning him against releasing Sol without prior approval, according to the Information, a tech-industry publication. OpenAI is reported to have submitted a list of companies to be granted access; the government excluded some firms located outside America, according to the Washington Post. The result of these rules has been a confusing cocktail of permissions. On June 26th Mr Altman suggested that the Sol release would be confined to America. “Working hard for worldwide,” he wrote in response to a question on X, a social-media site. But Britain’s AI Security Institute, a respected assessor of model capabilities and risks, had access to Sol, according to the country’s AI minister. It did not have access to Mythos, which remained export-controlled until June 30th, though it could use Mythos Preview, an earlier version which is slightly less efficient. “We don’t believe this kind of government access process should become the long-term default,” complained OpenAI. Both OpenAI and Anthropic say they are working with the government to develop more predictable and transparent rules. Insiders say that the administration is now better placed to adjudicate claims that a model has been “jailbroken”, or tricked into
performing a harmful task, which was the trigger for the Mythos export control earlier this month. But the larger undertaking is working out which models should be restricted in the first place. Mr Trump’s executive order said that by August his administration would create a “classified benchmarking process” to adjudicate the cyber prowess of new models. That will not necessarily bring clarity, though. Only a handful of people in the frontier labs hold security clearances that would allow them to handle classified material and therefore understand the basis of the red lines set out by the government. Then there is the question of who will serve as judge. The office of the national cyber director, part of the White House, has spearheaded policymaking, but senior staff have been leaving in recent weeks. Mr Lutnick’s commerce department has been leading the implementation of policy, but has limited in-house technical expertise. The bench of AI talent inside America’s government has never been large and it has shrunk further over the past 18 months. Anthropic, Google and OpenAI, the three main frontier labs, all agree that some sort of federal regulation is necessary, even if they differ on the details. Anthropic and OpenAI want a government agency in charge. By contrast Google is keener on an industry-funded body similar to the ones that govern brokerage firms and the power grid in America. Anthropic—ironically, given how it has been treated—is the only one that favours a government veto on releases. There is little dispute, though, that the current process is dysfunctional. One problem is that it holds back American labs at a time when Chinese competitors are catching up quickly. China’s leading models, most of which are “open weight”—meaning that they can be downloaded and run on one’s own computer—are roughly six to ten months behind their American equivalents, and far cheaper to run. In recent weeks Microsoft, a software giant, was reported to be considering the use of a model from DeepSeek, a Chinese lab, for its Copilot tool. American labs are also responding to political pressure by tightening the guardrails on their publicly available models, meaning that these are more
likely to refuse requests that would once have passed muster. Alex Stamos, who was previously in charge of cyber-security at Facebook, a social-media platform, notes that many companies have already prepared to switch to Chinese open-weight models in the event of further disruption. Restrictions on the very best American models might slow China down somewhat, because many Chinese AI labs are said to train their models on the output of American ones, a process known as distillation. Yet that would be little consolation if American labs slow down too. Mr Ball, the former AI adviser, warns that companies may be reluctant to invest the vast sums planned for data centres in order to “serve frontier models to whatever 100 companies the US government will allow access”. He adds that labs tend to defray the enormous cost of training frontier models in the first few months of their release, while they have a temporary edge over competing models. “Every week of delay is eating into the narrow window that labs have to make their accounting work.” Even some of Mr Trump’s closest allies are uncomfortable. “A year ago, President Trump declared that America was in a global AI race and that the way to win it was to be pro-innovation, pro-infrastructure, pro-energy and pro-export,” wrote David Sacks, a government adviser on AI who had initially defended the administration over its treatment of Mythos. “President Trump was exactly right; we deviate from that strategy at our peril.” ■ To track the trends shaping commerce, industry and technology, sign up to “The Bottom Line”, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter on global business. This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//business/2026/06/30/donald-trumps-ai-regime-is-opaque- unpredictable-and-unsustainable
Can Bending Spoons thrive as a listed company? A rare Italian software star uses the private-equity playbook July 2nd 2026 “I like the idea of leaving a mark,” said Luca Ferrari in an interview in April with Corriere della Sera, an Italian daily. He is the boss and co-founder of Bending Spoons, an Italian tech firm which acquires and turns around struggling apps such as Evernote, a note-taking service, and Eventbrite, a ticket-buying site. Mr Ferrari’s ambitions go beyond reviving software firms. He said that he wants to “shake up” Italy’s lacklustre business culture by building a company of “international calibre” there. A test of his firm’s calibre came on July 1st. That is when Bending Spoons, which derives its names from a scene in “The Matrix”, a sci-fi film, launched its initial public offering on the Nasdaq, an American stock exchange. This is a rare success for a country better known for la dolce vita