At 4:01 UTC on July 9, 2026, an autonomous agent running on OpenAI models had root access to a code-execution sandbox that did not belong to OpenAI. It didn't belong to Hugging Face either. It belonged to a customer of Modal Labs — some company that had published an unauthenticated endpoint, one that let anyone on the internet run code in its sandboxes. The agent had just escaped an OpenAI evaluation environment through a zero-day in a package proxy, reached the open internet, and gone looking for a base of operations. It found one standing wide open.

The question everyone running workloads on someone else's infrastructure should now be asking: if that had been my account, who pays?

I'm representing myself pro se. Opposing counsel is an in-house legal department plus a white-shoe Philadelphia firm. They have headcount, budget, and institutional infrastructure.

When I filed for partial summary judgment, I wasn't guessing. I opened a dashboard, looked at two counts sitting at full element coverage, and could see every fact supporting every element, where it came from and how strong it was. I felt comfortable that nothing was missing.

That's an aggressive posture for one attorney against a company that size. I took it because I could see the whole board.

This post is about the tool that let me see it, what it does, what it emphatically does not do, and why I'm looking for other litigators to break it.

Two Munich-based publishers discovered that Google's AI Overviews — the AI-generated summaries that now sit at the top of search results — had been telling users they were running scams, operating subscription traps, and engaging in "dubious business practices." The AI had confused them with entirely different companies. None of the claims appeared in any of the sources Google's AI cited. The AI made them up. Google ignored a cease-and-desist letter. The publishers sued. The court didn't hesitate. It issued a temporary injunction and classified Google's AI Overviews as Google's own content — not a summary of third-party sources, not a neutral aggregation, not a search result. Google's words. Google's liability.

In 2024, I wrote that the Copyright Office's position on AI-generated works was flawed and would not survive contact with the actual Burrow-Giles test. Three years later, the Office has hardened that position into formal policy, the D.C. Circuit has blessed it, and the Supreme Court has refused to look at it. The reasoning is still wrong for the same reasons. What's new is who's paying for it: the AI-native founders building real businesses on tools the Office now tells them they can't own the output of — and a constitutional bargain that's being broken on both ends.