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.

There's a quiet crisis unfolding at the intersection of immigration policy and American innovation — and most of the founders caught in it are too afraid to speak publicly about it. Startup founders who have lived in the U.S. for years won't leave the country to see their family because they don't trust what happens at the border on the way back. That is the situation in 2025 for a staggering share of the founders powering American innovation. If you're a non-citizen founder navigating this landscape, or you're investing in companies where this is a live issue, here are some options.

Small and mid-sized businesses make up 99.9% of all American companies, generating $13.3 trillion in annual revenue—45% of the entire U.S. economy. Yet when it comes to accessing high-quality legal counsel, these business owners face an invisible barrier that costs them millions at the moment that matters most: exit.

One of the most striking phrases in Dario Amodei’s essay The Adolescence of Technology is his description of advanced AI as “a country of geniuses in a datacenter.”

What we are building in datacenters is not a country of geniuses—but a country of extremely powerful tools that could concentrate unprecedented capability in few hands. The risks are real, but they're different: not millions of independent minds plotting discoveries, but rather the danger of mistaking fluency for understanding, speed for wisdom, and pattern-mastery for the embodied intelligence that actually creates new knowledge.

The danger is not that AI is too human. It’s that we mistake fluency, speed, and pattern mastery for the kind of intelligence that actually creates new knowledge.