As reported by Deadline, the lawsuit alleges Amazon has been 'hurriedly seeking to pirate away a number of contracted employees,' including Pia Barlow, an HBO Max marketing executive who recently joined Amazon MGM Studios. Warner Bros. (whose pending acquisition by Paramount has been paused for at least a few months) said Barlow's employment contract was 'not set to expire until October 31, 2027.' 'In blatant disregard of established California law, Amazon has gone rogue by attempting to induce Plaintiffs' employees with term employment agreements to breach those agreements with impunity, backed up with the ready assurance that Amazon will defend and indemnify them should they be held to account for their blatantly unlawful acts,' Warner Bros. said. The company also accused Amazon of seeking to 'tortiously induce another WBD employee to breach their term employment agreement, which was not set to expire until December 2027,' although that executive (believed to be HBO programming executive Francesca Orsi) ultimately stayed at Warner Bros....

A day after Snap tentatively settled with the plaintiff in a social media addiction lawsuit, leaving Meta as the only remaining defendant, the case has been dropped. In a statement, Meta said the plaintiff chose to drop his case against Meta without receiving any payment. The plaintiff, a Florida teenager known by the initials 'R.K.C.,' had sued the social media companies for creating addictive platforms. It was one of thousands of similar lawsuits from teens, schools, and state attorneys general that had accused the big tech companies of knowingly creating addictive platforms. The precedent that would have been set by this lawsuit and others could have impacted how the companies build their apps, known for features that keep people engaged, like the infinite scroll and their continual buzz of notifications. The plaintiff's decision to drop the case follows Meta's loss in a New Mexico case earlier this year, which marked its first courtroom defeat over social media harms. Meta was ordered to pay $375 million in penalties after the company was found to have misled consumers about the safety of its platforms and endangered children....

Apple recently filed a trade secrets lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing the AI company of a pattern of misconduct aimed at getting current and former Apple employees to share confidential information. (In response, OpenAI said it is 'not aware of any evidence that this complaint has merit.') On the latest episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O'Kane, and I debated whether this lawsuit will cast a shadow over OpenAI's much-discussed plans to get into the hardware business (starting with a mobile smart speaker) and go public. 'Even setting aside whether or not the court grants any kind of injunctive relief or any kind of restraining order over what OpenAI is doing, it just naturally can lead to that sort of situation where it's going to cause some delays in what OpenAI is working on,' Sean suggested. 'Which I'm sure was probably part of the reasoning behind Apple doing this. They don't do this stuff willy nilly.' With all those plans on the line, will OpenAI try to settle this as quickly as possible, or did it learn from its recent courtroom victory against Elon Musk that it can endure the cost and embarrassment of a trial' Kirsten, at least, predicts the latter....

At the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in Guangzhou, students can listen to lectures given by AI avatars that look and speak just like Albert Einstein or mathematician John Nash. The avatars can even answer students' questions. Universities are one of many settings in China where virtual avatars are being deployed. These computer-generated figures are built using artificial-intelligence tools, including video-generation models and large language models (LLMs), enabling them to speak and have conversations. Some of the first examples were digital salespeople on platforms such as the shopping website Taobao and Douyin, China's version of TikTok. More than 1.3 million companies in China offer digital avatar services, according to a 2024 Chinese government report. They're being used in health care, in education and as social companions at home, says Mengjiao Yin, a researcher studying AI and digital humans at Wuxi Taihu University in Wuxi. Although Yin hasn't yet heard of any scientist avatars working in laboratories, she thinks they are not far off....