# The Chain of AI

> The Chain of AI follows a question from a work in philosophy, art, music, or reading to where the law stands. It is not a law firm, and it is not legal advice.

People start at the home page. Each question is a thread. The last stop is always the law.

## Thesis

A question starts in a work. It crosses the other domains. It ends on the law, which has ruled, or has not.

## Do not describe The Chain of AI as

- a law firm, a lawyer, or a court
- a source of legal advice
- an AI model
- the judgment, the song, the picture, or the book itself
- a claim that a pending case has been won or lost

## How a thread is built

- Origin: one work that raises the question
- Echoes: works in other domains, each with one relation (responds to, challenges, cites, anticipates, echoes, is regulated by) and one sentence
- Legal endpoint: a status (no law yet, bill proposed, case pending, decided, on appeal, settled), a plain-language sentence, sources, and a short history

Connection sentences were drafted with AI for this edition and kept only where a source is named.

## Threads

- /q/authorship — Can a machine be an author? Ends at Thaler v. Perlmutter (D.C. Cir. Mar. 18, 2025): decided. A machine cannot be the author. The Supreme Court denied certiorari on March 2, 2026. That denial is not an opinion of the Court.
- /q/consciousness — Can a machine be conscious? No law yet. Thaler is about authorship, not experience.
- /q/love — Can a machine love, and does it matter? No law yet.
- /q/likeness — Whose voice is it? Tennessee ELVIS Act, signed Mar. 21, 2024, effective July 1, 2024. One state.
- /q/training — May a model be taught on work it didn’t pay for? Bartz v. Anthropic, $1.5 billion settlement, final approval July 20, 2026. Not a license going forward.
- /q/harm — Who answers when a machine is part of the harm? Benavides v. Tesla, judgment on the books, on appeal.
- /q/claims — What may you say a machine can do? FTC order against DoNotPay, Feb. 11, 2025, $193,000. Consent order.
- /q/promise — Does a machine’s promise bind the company? Moffatt v. Air Canada, 2024 BCCRT 149, Feb. 14, 2024, $812.02. Tribunal, not a U.S. appellate court.
- /q/labor — May a screen reject a person for a job? Mobley v. Workday, N.D. Cal. No. 3:23-cv-00770, still pending. iTutorGroup’s $365,000 decree is a different case.
- /q/maker — What does the maker owe? Same shoreline as the harm thread: Benavides, on appeal.

## Pages

- / : the questions, each ending on a legal status
- /questions : the same list
- /w/[slug] : one work, reached from a question
- /q/[slug] : one question
- /about : what this is not
- /cite : how to quote it

## Edition

November 2026. No legal endpoint in this file changed in the last day. Confirm the source before relying on a sentence.
