Insights

San Francisco – January 15, 2025: Crowell & Moring counsel Anna Z. Saber was appointed to the board of directors of the Iranian American Bar Association’s (IABA) Northern California Chapter. The IABA is the only national association of Iranian-American judges, attorneys, legal scholars, and law students in the U.S. with over 1,500 members and eight chapters nationwide.

Washington — Dec. 3, 2024: Crowell & Moring represented Microsoft and LF Projects in seizing 240 fraudulent websites linked to an Egypt-based criminal organization. On November 21, 2024, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia unsealed a temporary restraining order against Abanoub Nady (known online as “MRxC0DER”) and John Doe Defendants (collectively the “Fake ONNX Defendants”), who developed, sold, and implemented “do it yourself” phishing kits under the predominant brand names “ONNX” and “Caffeine,” among several others. In selling these kits under the ONNX name, the cybercriminals misappropriated and misused the “ONNX” trademark, which is owned by LF Projects. LF Projects uses the ONNX name and logo in connection with the Open Neural Network Exchange, a platform that enables interoperability between AI models throughout the tech industry. Numerous cybercriminal and online threat actors purchased these kits and used them in widespread phishing campaigns to bypass additional security measures and break into Microsoft customer accounts.

The Really Simple Licensing Collective (“RSL Collective”), a nonprofit dedicated to creating collective licensing solutions for content creators and publishers, has announced Really Simple Licensing (“RSL”), a new standard designed to stop crawlers from scraping websites for content without permission or compensation. If adopted, RSL could have major implications for both online platforms and the AI technologies that source content for training data from them.

On July 23, 2025, the White House released Winning the Race: America’s AI Action Plan (“the Plan”) the Trump Administration’s most significant policy statement on artificial intelligence to date.

In a unanimous opinion issued by the D.C. Circuit on March 18, 2025, the Court of Appeals affirmed denial of Dr. Stephen Thaler’s application to register a copyright protection for a work created by his generative artificial intelligence system, holding that the Copyright Act requires human authorship.

In 2024, Latin American countries ramped up their data protection laws, following the general trend seen in international privacy law outside of the European Union. While many countries in Latin America enacted measures in 2024, others scheduled their regulations to go into effect in early 2025, and still others continue to wrestle with the legislative process.

The landscape of AI governance and regulation is shifting. Following the release of the White House’s “America’s AI Action Plan” in July 2025 and the President’s signing of related Executive Orders, the White House has emphasized (at least rhetorically) a preference for innovation, adoption, and deregulation. But that does not tell the entire story. The Administration remains committed to exercising a heavy hand in AI, including by banning the U.S. government’s procurement of so-called “woke AI,” intervening in the development of data centers and the export of the AI technology stack, imposing an export fee for certain semiconductors to China, and assuming a stake in a U.S. semiconductor company. State legislatures are also racing to implement their own regulations, particularly around AI’s use in critical areas, such as healthcare, labor and employment, and data privacy. The many sources of regulation raise the specter of a fragmented compliance environment for businesses. This webinar will delve into the Administration’s AI strategy, going beyond the headlines to analyze: