The Innovation Attorney Podcast

14:20

Who Pays When An AI Vendor Causes Uncovered Harm

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/09/22

A startup whose AI vendor causes a customer harm outside the vendor’s contract and outside the startup’s own technology errors and omissions policy pays for that harm itself, out of its own cash, because the customer never had a contract with the vendor in the first place. Every dollar of that claim comes off the same balance sheet a venture investor is counting on to reach the next milestone.Most founders read the indemnification paragraph in their AI vendor’s order form, see the word indemnify,

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17:01

What Does California’s Adam’s Law Require Of Chatbot...

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/09/22

California Senate Bill 1119, Adam’s Law, requires a startup whose companion chatbot a minor can reach from California to complete a pre deployment risk assessment, build a crisis protocol that routes a suicidal minor to a parent or to the 988 line, and commission a third party audit of its own compliance by January 1, 2029. The Governor of California signed the bill on September 10, 2026. It adds Business and Professions Code sections 21810.5 through 21816, and it is the first state law to attach a

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13:06

Anthropic’s June Filing Shows the 2026 IPO Window Is...

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/09/22

A venture backed company that still has no confidential registration statement on file with the Securities and Exchange Commission is running out of runway to reach the public market before 2027, not because investors have lost their appetite for growth stories, but because the accounting calendar that governs Regulation S-X Rule 3-12 no longer leaves enough days between now and December to complete underwriting on financials that will still be current at pricing.Founders preparing for an initial

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15:20

Physical Infrastructure Took Seven of Ten Largest...

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/09/22

As of the week of September 21, 2026, seven of the ten largest venture rounds funded physical infrastructure such as Rainmaker and Kairos Power, not AI application software. Samsung C&T did not simply write Kairos Power an equity check: it put in $70 million in cash and separately committed up to $100 million in engineering services, drawing on a company that has built or helped build about a dozen nuclear reactors, toward two reactors rising in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Most software founders will

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19:56

Personalized AI Pricing Rules Tighten

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/09/22

The Federal Trade Commission voted two to zero on August 19, 2026 to propose an enforcement policy statement targeting undisclosed personalized pricing under Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, the clearest signal yet that a startup adjusting prices by customer data now carries federal exposure independent of any state artificial intelligence statute. The proposal targets a business that shows one consumer a price built from that consumer’s own data while representing the price as

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27:32

SpaceX Reveals a 2.6 Billion Dollar Orbital AI Bet

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/09/21

SpaceX reported 7.8 billion dollars in second quarter 2026 revenue on August 4, 2026, and disclosed an artificial intelligence segment that grew 247 percent to 2.561 billion dollars. That segment, built on the January 2026 acquisition of xAI, already rents graphics processing units to Anthropic and Google for a combined 26 billion dollars a year. The same earnings disclosure confirmed a Federal Communications Commission filing for up to one million satellites designed to move that compute into

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44:07

Magnesium: Extraction, Metallurgy, and Manufacturing Use

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/09/20

China produced 950,000 of the 1,100,000 metric tons of primary magnesium made worldwide in 2025, while the United States produced none after its sole smelter filed for bankruptcy. American primary magnesium output has been zero since limited operations at the Rowley, Utah electrolytic plant ended in 2022, following critical equipment failures in 2021 and a force majeure declaration on supply contracts dated September 29, 2021. The operator filed for Chapter 11 protection in September 2025, and on

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25:32

Agentic AI Diligence

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/09/19

Agentic AI enterprise software defensibility rests on customer data rights and audit records rather than model quality, in a market projected to reach $190 billion by 2030. The clause that decides whether an agentic AI company owns anything was written before generative AI existed. It sits in the definitions section of the standard customer agreement, it permits the vendor to use customer data to improve its products, and it is the entire legal basis for the proprietary learning loop that every

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15:15

Does An 83b Election Affect QSBS Tax Exclusion...

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/09/18

A founder who wants the Section 1202 gain exclusion on restricted stock must file a Section 83(b) election within thirty days of the transfer date, because 26 CFR Section 1.83-4 ties the start of the Section 1202 holding period to that election, not to the date the stock vests. File on time and the clock starts the day the company issues the shares. Miss the window and the clock restarts, tranche by tranche, on every vesting date, and there is close to no reliable way to fix a missed filing after

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14:33

What Should Startups Put In Executive Severance...

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/09/18

On September 9, 2026, Automattic’s board voted to place founder and chief executive officer Matt Mullenweg on paid leave, named chief financial officer Mark Davies interim chief executive officer, and by the next afternoon watched Davies and chief legal officer Andy Missan sign each other a combined $8.15 million severance package. Automattic reversed the vote inside thirty three hours, confirmed on September 12, 2026, that Mullenweg remained chairman and chief executive officer with the board’s

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15:47

Employee Tender Offers Hit a Four Year High in 2026

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/09/18

Employee tender offer volume reached a four year high in the first half of 2026, when seventy one deals worth three billion dollars closed under new federal rules that shortened the standard offer period. The decision facing a venture backed company this year is not whether tender offers have become common. They have. The decision is which structure to use, because the wrong one can strip a tax exclusion from every option granted in the surrounding two years.Most founders planning a tender offer

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16:55

New Hart Scott Rodino Thresholds

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/09/18

A term sheet that priced a company’s Series D round at $130 million would have forced the lead investor into a Hart Scott Rodino filing and a thirty day wait in 2025. Close that same round in 2026, after the Federal Trade Commission raised the Hart Scott Rodino Act size of transaction threshold from $126.4 million to $133.9 million on February 17, 2026, and the filing obligation disappears entirely. Nothing about the company changed. Nothing about the round’s terms changed. Only the government’s

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17:21

How to Size Indemnification Caps Against Insurance...

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/09/18

A venture backed company should never let a contract’s indemnification cap exceed what its Technology Errors and Omissions policy and any standalone artificial intelligence liability policy will actually pay. Clorox Company’s $380 million complaint against Cognizant Technology Solutions U.S. Corporation, filed July 23, 2025, in the Superior Court of California, Alameda County, shows what happens once a cap and its carve outs are tested against real damages rather than against the multiple of fees

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38:00

Agentic AI Rules Reshape Autonomous Vehicle Law

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/09/18

Agentic AI regulation reaches autonomous vehicles through vehicle type approval and product safety law, a route that Regulation (EU) 2026/1744 delayed to August 2, 2028 for automotive artificial intelligence. The artificial intelligence statutes moving through American legislatures were written for models and for decisions about people. Almost none of them govern the driving task. What governs the driving task is older and narrower: the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards and the exemption

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14:30

Technology E&O Insurance for AI Product Output in 2026

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/09/17

A startup can still buy technology errors and omissions insurance that pays a claim over its AI product’s bad output in 2026, but only from the specific carriers, CFC and Beazley among them, that added affirmative artificial intelligence endorsements this year rather than relying on a legacy policy that never mentions the word model.The mechanic most founders miss is that the exclusion making headlines this year does not live inside the policy that actually pays their claim. The Insurance Services

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17:08

Your SaaS Contract May Already License AI Training Data

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/09/17

The Federal Trade Commission ordered a California photo app called Everalbum to delete the photographs it had collected and every facial recognition model it had built from those photographs, and it issued that order in January 2021, two years before most founders had heard the phrase generative AI. The remedy is called algorithmic disgorgement, and it is the clearest indicator regulators have given that a company cannot keep the output of improperly used data even after deleting the input

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22:45

Can Consumers Enforce Open Source License Obligations

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/09/17

A pending Orange County Superior Court trial in Software Freedom Conservancy v. Vizio could let any consumer sue a manufacturer to enforce General Public License source code obligations in 2026. The Conservancy bought a single Vizio SmartCast television, asked for the Linux source code the license already required Vizio to hand over, and is now five years into proving that the buyer of a device, and not a copyright holder alone, may compel that disclosure in court. A December 2025 ruling already

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20:11

Do State Privacy Laws Apply to Startups With No...

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/09/17

Indiana, Kentucky, and Rhode Island privacy laws, effective January 1, 2026, apply to any startup crossing each law’s consumer threshold, regardless of office or employee location. None of the three statutes conditions coverage on a physical footprint inside the state. Each measures the number of that state’s residents whose personal data a company controls or processes, or the share of revenue the company earns from selling that data, once the company conducts business in the state or directs

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37:04

Beijing’s Local US Government Playbook

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/09/17

Eileen Wang, elected mayor of Arcadia, California, pleaded guilty on May 29, 2026, in the Central District of California to acting as an illegal agent of the People’s Republic of China under 18 U.S.C. Section 951. Wang admitted that from late 2020 through 2022 she and Yaoning “Mike” Sun operated a website called U.S. News Center at the direction of unnamed PRC officials, posting propaganda drafted in Beijing and reporting readership back through WeChat. Sun was sentenced on February 9, 2026, to 48

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17:31

From the Country that Brought You Chernobyl

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/09/16

The Buk Reactor Behind Kosmos 954 Still Shapes Space Nuclear Lawwhy did the soviet union put a nuclear reactor in orbitA Soviet nuclear reactor called Buk fell out of orbit and scattered radioactive debris across northern Canada on January 24, 1978, after the satellite carrying it, Kosmos 954, lost control. Soviet engineers had built Buk to power a satellite radar system that tracked American and NATO warships from an orbit too low and too power hungry for the solar panels of the 1970s to sustain,

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