Contract Negotiation

Venable LLP has published a legal analysis identifying a critical gap in U.S. law: traditional agency doctrine does not clearly govern autonomous AI systems, leaving liability allocation ambiguous when these systems act beyond their intended scope. Unlike human agents, AI systems lack independent legal status, forcing courts to apply existing doctrines—attribution, apparent authority, negligence, and product liability—in unprecedented ways. At least one jurisdiction has already moved forward. In Moffatt v. Air Canada, British Columbia courts held a company liable for inaccurate statements made through an AI chatbot, signaling that courts are beginning to assign responsibility despite the legal framework's uncertainty.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit denied Anthropic's emergency request on April 8, 2026, to block the Pentagon's March 3 designation of the AI company as a supply-chain risk under 41 U.S.C. 4713 and 10 U.S.C. 3252. The blacklist remains in effect, barring Anthropic from new Pentagon contracts and requiring defense contractors to stop using its Claude AI system in military work. A three-judge panel—Judges Henderson, Katsas, and Rao—ruled that the government's national security interests during active military conflict outweigh Anthropic's financial harm. The court expedited oral arguments to May 19.

OpenAI announced a partnership with seven major consulting firms—Accenture, Capgemini, PwC, CGI, Cognizant, Infosys, and Tata Consultancy Services—to commercialize and scale Codex, its AI coding agent. The initiative, branded Codex Labs, will combine OpenAI's technology with the consulting firms' enterprise relationships and implementation expertise to integrate the tool into real-world workflows across knowledge work beyond pure software development. OpenAI reported that Codex has reached 4 million weekly active users, up from 3 million two weeks prior.