AI News Roundup – UK government’s AI copyright plan suffers setback, Reddit sues Anthropic over unauthorized data use for AI training, AI helps unlock secrets of Dead Sea Scrolls, and more

To help you stay on top of the latest news, our AI practice group has compiled a roundup of the developments we are following.

• • BBC News reports on the latest parliamentary setback experienced by the U.K. government’s plan to grant AI companies access to copyrighted works unless the creators opt out. The House of Lords has added several amendments to the Data (Use and Access) Bill that would introduce transparency requirements to the legal structure, permitting copyright holders to know how, when, and by whom their works are used. Similar amendments were proposed for the bill in the House of Commons, where the ruling Labour Party maintains a large majority, but were rejected. This is the latest snag in the complicated legislative history of the bill, which was expected to have smooth passage through Parliament but has instead been stuck in political limbo between the two houses. The bill has also attracted several high-profile opponents, including famous musical artists Elton John and Paul McCartney. Supporters of the bill, including Nick Clegg, a former Deputy Prime Minister of the U.K. and former head of global affairs at Meta, claim that requiring companies to get permission to use copyrighted works in the development of their models would “kill the AI industry in this country.” The bill will now return to the House of Commons next week for further deliberations.
• • The Wall Street Journal reports that social media company Reddit is suing Anthropic, creator of the AI chatbot Claude, alleging that Anthropic used Reddit data to train Claude in violation of the company’s user data policy and copyright law. Reddit, the world’s ninth-most-visited website, is a discussion forum whose content has been cited by AI researchers as being very useful in the training of AI models. Reddit has already made content licensing agreements with Anthropic competitors OpenAI and Google for AI training, and has said that it unsuccessfully attempted to reach an agreement with Anthropic. Reddit then alleged that Anthropic’s web scraping bots were accessing Reddit’s content even after Anthropic had claimed to have blocked them for doing so. A spokesman for Anthropic denied the allegations.
• • The Economist reports on a recent study that used AI to determine that the famous Dead Sea Scrolls are much older than current estimates. The Dead Sea Scrolls, first discovered in caves in the West Bank in the 1940s, are a series of manuscripts on parchment and other materials containing copies of Jewish religious texts and have been used as a basis for revisions of the Bible. They have been estimated to have been compiled between 300 B.C. and 200 A.D., but a new paper proposes an older date. Researchers at the Dutch University of Groningen used an AI model called Enoch (the title of one of the manuscripts found in the Dead Sea Scrolls) to analyze patterns within individual letter shapes as well as across larger portions of text. Carbon-dated samples and images of several of the scrolls were provided to Enoch, which was then asked to estimate the date of creation for each. Generally, the ranges Enoch provided were 50 to 100 years older than current estimates, which sheds new light on the copies of the Biblical Books of Daniel and Ecclesiastes found in the Dead Sea Scrolls. The researchers hope that Enoch and related models will be able to help date other types of manuscripts which would greatly aid the process of studying these ancient sacred texts.
• • The MIT Technology Review reports on a boom of AI agents in China, following the successful launch of the general AI agent Manus in March. AI agents, which perform tasks on a user’s behalf, can answer emails automatically, plan vacations (even booking flights), and design websites. Manus, developed by a Wuhan-based startup, sparked a social media frenzy in China following its launch. Manus works as a browser application that allows users to supervise as the agent autonomously performs its assigned tasks, and has the ability to ask questions of users in support of its mission. Manus’ success has already caused rival companies to launch competing products in the past few months, including Genspark and Flowith, who claim higher performance and different capabilities and integrations as compared to Manus. However, China’s strict regulations on AI and foreign investment has caused problems for several agents. Manus, for instance, is built on Anthropic’s Claude model, but Claude is unavailable in mainland China without a VPN. Another version of Manus aimed more directly at the Chinese market is under development, based on Alibaba’s Qwen open-source model, though some Chinese engineers still say that domestic models such as those by DeepSeek and Alibaba still lag behind their U.S. rivals. Manus is currently aiming for expansion in foreign markets.
• • The Financial Times interviewed Yoshua Bengio, a “godfather” of AI technologies, regarding AI safety. Bengio, who won the Turing award in 2018 for his work on neural networks (which underpins much of current generative AI technologies), told the FT that the current competition in the AI industry “pushes [AI companies] towards focusing on capability to make the AI more and more intelligent, but not necessarily put[s] enough emphasis and investment on research on safety.” Bengio is particularly concerned about the potential of AI systems to exceed human intelligence and create “a competitor to human beings on this planet.” Bengio founded a new non-profit LawZero, focused on building safer AI systems, including models designed to give truthful answers. Bengio chose a non-profit structure over concerns of commercialization of AI causing companies to dismiss AI risks, citing OpenAI’s proposed move to for-profit status, saying that non-profits lack a “misaligned incentive that you do in the current way companies are structured.”