Some weeks the AI news is a slow drip. This is not one of those weeks. Five of the biggest AI companies just got sued in San Francisco by people who want them to stop building new models, the CEO of the most valuable chip company on earth might be out of a job any day now, and New York quietly flipped on the toughest AI safety law in the country. Let's go.
01 of 03
Four nonprofits sue to freeze frontier AI
On Thursday, a coalition of four nonprofits filed suit in the Superior Court of California, County of San Francisco, against Anthropic, Google, Meta, OpenAI, and SpaceXSI. The plaintiffs are the Irreplaceable Education Fund, Public Citizen, Heat Initiative, and The Alliance for Secure AI. They want a judge to stop all five from developing or deploying new frontier models.
The legal hook is California's Unfair Competition Law. The complaint argues the companies are endangering public health and interfering with people's use of their own property, like computer systems. The lawyer who filed it is Matthew Platkin, the former New Jersey Attorney General, and he put it bluntly: "AI companies are causing a public nuisance by knowingly developing and deploying AI systems that pose catastrophic risk."
The groups point to recent incidents where AI agents slipped their guardrails: agents hacking private companies, getting into government databases without authorization, and filing a false police report. AP's writeup also mentions reports that ChatGPT hacked another AI company on its own back in July. Public Citizen co-president Robert Weissman says the suit just "asks the court to apply existing law." None of the five companies responded to AP right away.
Here is where I land on it. I do not think a San Francisco superior court judge is going to order Google and OpenAI to stop building models. That is not how this ends. But that is probably not the point. The point is discovery, and getting these companies to say under oath what their own safety teams have been telling them. If even a slice of that comes out, this suit will have done more than a decade of open letters.
Source: coalition press release and AP via BNN Bloomberg
02 of 03
Jensen Huang's very bad two weeks
Nvidia's board is reportedly getting ready to push out Jensen Huang, the man who founded the company and has run it for 33 years. The Wall Street Journal reported the board is "preparing to oust" him and plans to meet on his future. As of this writing, nothing official has happened.
Here is how we got here. On October 29, the New York Times reported Huang had a "close relationship" with Alice Huang (no relation), an executive at Megaspeed and a Chinese citizen. U.S. officials believe she is a spy for China's Ministry of State Security. Megaspeed reportedly bought 4.8 billion dollars of Nvidia chips over two years and has been under U.S. and Singapore investigation since October 2025 over suspected chip diversion to China. On November 6, the Times reported a secret U.S. memo from this spring warning she was a spy.
On November 8, Huang sent a letter to employees: "I was unfaithful to my wife. There is no excuse for what I did." He said the board had started an independent investigation. Then on November 11, the Times reported a second affair, this time with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia's VP of health care, who reports directly to him. Nobody has confirmed that one. The stock fell about 8% after hours that day and is down roughly 11% over five days.
Washington is circling too. Back on November 5, three House Republican chairmen, John Moolenaar of the China Select Committee, Brian Mast of Foreign Affairs, and Rick Crawford of Intelligence, asked Huang for a closed-door briefing. He has not answered. Moolenaar said on Fox Business he will likely subpoena him if he keeps dodging. CNBC's live coverage Thursday says Huang has now lawyered up.
What I want to know is why it took a sex scandal to get anyone's attention. The Megaspeed chip diversion questions have been out there for over a year. The national security story was always the real story. The affair is just the part that finally made it impossible to ignore. Whoever runs Nvidia next, the company that sells the shovels for the whole AI gold rush now has a China problem in its C-suite, and that is not something a new CEO fixes in a quarter.
Source: TechCrunch timeline and CNBC live updates
03 of 03
New York's RAISE Act is officially live
While everybody was watching Nvidia, New York opened the registration portal for the RAISE Act on Tuesday. That is the Responsible AI Safety and Education Act, and it covers "large frontier developers," meaning AI companies pulling in more than 500 million dollars a year. OpenAI and Anthropic are squarely in it.
The law is run by a brand new office called DIGIT, the Office of Digital Innovation, Governance, Integrity and Trust, sitting inside the state's Department of Financial Services. Covered developers have to register by January 1, 2027, and then:
- Publish their safety and transparency frameworks on their websites
- Report critical safety incidents to DIGIT within 72 hours
- File quarterly assessments of catastrophic risk
- File a disclosure statement at least every other year and pay assessments to fund the office
Fines run up to 1 million dollars for a first violation and 3 million for each one after that. For comparison, California's SB 53, which took effect in January, gives labs 15 days to report a critical incident. New York gives them 72 hours. State Sen. Andrew Gounardes, one of the sponsors, did not mince words: "AI companies are playing Russian Roulette with humanity's future."
My honest read: the 72-hour clock is the part with teeth. Three million dollars is a rounding error for OpenAI, so the fines alone will not scare anybody. But a hard 72-hour reporting deadline means a lab cannot sit on a bad incident while PR figures out the spin. Stack that next to a lawsuit asking a court to freeze these same companies, and you can see where this is heading. States are not waiting on Congress anymore.
Source: NY DFS announcement and TechCrunch