The Innovation Attorney Podcast

20:55

Nolla Health’s Utah AI Medication Prescribing Sandbox

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/10/08

Utah’s October 5, 2026 agreement with Nolla Health lets an AI system issue first time prescriptions for eight topical acne formulations, yet the state waived only its own licensing rules, and FDA, pharmacy law, and patient lawsuits remain in force. A founder who reads the agreement as a legal green light has misread what a state can give. Utah can promise not to enforce its Medical Practice Act, its Pharmacy Practice Act, and its telehealth provision. It cannot promise anything on behalf of the Food

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31:26

GPT 6.1 Astra Shelved

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/10/08

OpenAI shelved GPT 6.1 Astra on September 28, 2026, so any startup that scheduled October features around that model needs a contingency plan that does not depend on OpenAI’s calendar. AI model vendor contingency comes down to three controls: pinned model snapshots, a routing layer that can send traffic to a second provider, and evaluation gates the startup runs itself.Nobody breached a contract. No API customer lost a model that was already shipping, and coverage states no change for existing

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31:54

How Should A Startup Switch Between API Models And...

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/10/08

Mistral Large 4 weights, due in late October 2026, need about 1.05 terabytes of GPU memory at 8 bit precision, so switching from the API is an engineering decision. Mistral released the model on October 6, 2026 with 1.05 trillion total parameters, 49 billion active per token, a one million token context window, and prices of $1.36 per million input tokens and $4.18 per million output tokens. A startup that treats the weights release as a price cut will be disappointed. A startup that builds a

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12:15

AI Law Gives Startups Sixty Days To Fix A Six Figure...

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/10/08

Texas House Bill 149, the Responsible Artificial Intelligence Governance Act, took effect January 1, 2026, and gives a startup exactly sixty days from the Attorney General’s written notice to fix a cited violation before the penalty climbs from a few thousand dollars to as much as $200,000. The Attorney General holds exclusive authority to enforce the statute, so the notice a founder actually has to answer comes from one office in Austin, not from a competitor’s lawsuit or a class action filed in

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11:01

AI Usage Based Pricing Contract Renewal Terms

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/10/07

A venture backed company that renews its software contracts on the old per seat template this year is agreeing to pricing mechanics it cannot audit, cap, or benchmark, because the vendor on the other side of the table has already rebuilt its own billing engine around usage and outcomes.Salesforce sold its Agentforce product under a flat $2.00 per conversation fee at general availability on October 29, 2024. Seven months later, on May 15, 2025, it added Flex Credits, priced at $500.00 per 100,000

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15:42

Employee Equity Liquidity After Carta And Pulley Exit...

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/10/06

Startups now design employee equity liquidity through company sponsored tender offers, broker matched secondary sales, direct buybacks, or option financing, since Carta exited secondaries and Pulley closes December 8, 2026. Carta exited the secondary trading business on January 9, 2024, citing a conflict of interest it could not manage between holding customer cap table data and trading against it, and Pulley, the rival platform that built its business on being the alternative to Carta, will shut

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18:52

Stock Option Backdating Cost the UnitedHealth CEO...

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/10/05

Stock option backdating cost former UnitedHealth Group chief executive William McGuire $468 million on December 6, 2007, after the SEC alleged he selected low price grant dates retroactively.Backdating means writing a grant date earlier than the date the board acted, so the exercise price matches a historical low. A $30 exercise price on a stock that trades at $50 hands the executive $20 per share on the first day. The practice violated federal securities law when companies hid that gap from

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28:10

Deep Fission Gravity Reactor

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/10/05

Deep Fission’s one mile deep Gravity reactor has no Nuclear Regulatory Commission license application on file as of September 2026, and its June 2026 prospectus describes the design as conceptual. The Commission’s pre application record under Docket 99902126 shows no date for a combined license submission. The Department of Energy approved a Nuclear Safety Design Agreement for the project in July 2026, a milestone that authorizes no operation.Gravity is a miniature pressurized water reactor fueled

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12:42

The Lyft Settlement For Gig Worker Misclassification...

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/10/05

On October 1, 2026, Lyft agreed to pay $272.5 million to settle a California Labor Commissioner lawsuit accusing the company of misclassifying drivers as independent contractors from April 6, 2016, through December 15, 2020. Eighty seven percent of that figure, $236.875 million, goes straight to drivers rather than to the state treasury or to outside counsel. The Labor Commissioner’s office filed the underlying case in August 2020, which means Lyft spent six years and a California Supreme Court

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34:44

Government Action and Fraud in Six American Financial...

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/10/05

Executive SummaryGovernment deregulation and supervisory forbearance caused or worsened six American financial crises between 1982 and 2008, and fraud enlarged the losses in each one. The Savings and Loan Crisis, the dotcom crash, the Enron collapse, the WorldCom fraud, the 2008 mortgage crash, and the 2005 to 2006 stock option backdating scandal each began with a government decision that widened the room for risk or loosened the supervision of it. Fraud then converted ordinary business failure into

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23:54

The 2026 Venture Fund Anti Money Laundering Landscape

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/10/05

No federal law requires venture funds to establish a formal anti money laundering compliance program in 2026, because FinCEN delayed the Investment Adviser AML Rule until January 1, 2028. The final rule making that change was published at 91 FR 36 on January 2, 2026. An exemptive relief order issued on August 5, 2025 had already suspended every requirement of the rule in the interim. A venture fund adviser has no program, reporting, or recordkeeping duty under 31 CFR Part 1032 for the next seventeen

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16:53

Oklo Natural Nuclear Reactors

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/10/05

Executive SummaryThe Oklo natural nuclear reactors in Gabon, discovered in 1972, sustained uranium fission chain reactions about 2 billion years ago and remain the only confirmed natural reactors on Earth. Sixteen reactor zones across the Oklo, Okélobondo, and Bangombé uranium deposits reached criticality because natural uranium then held about 3.5 percent uranium 235 and groundwater slowed neutrons inside ore that contained very little neutron absorbing material. Boiling water shut each zone down

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13:41

Should Startups Hedge GPU Costs With Futures Contracts

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/10/05

Nvidia H100 and B200 rental futures began trading under NYMEX rules on October 5, 2026, giving a venture backed company its first public, exchange traded price for the hourly cost of renting the chip that runs most frontier model training today. The contract settles in cash against Silicon Data’s published rental index, and it pays or costs a company the difference between that index and the price locked at purchase, without ever delivering a chip. For a startup carrying a seven figure monthly

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40:17

How Far Will AI Inference Costs Fall

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/10/05

A model developer’s own benchmarking shows the cost of answering the hardest questions in its most demanding category rising three to eighteen times a year, even while the price it charges per token keeps falling. That is not a contradiction. It is the fact a deep tech founder setting a three year or five year AI product price needs to understand before signing anything, because it means the single number most founders reach for, the published per token price trend, describes a different product

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14:40

Stripe Bought OpenRouter

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/10/05

Stripe’s acquisition of OpenRouter for more than $7 billion, announced in August 2026, puts the company that marketed itself as the neutral alternative to picking one AI model inside the payment processor that already handles a large share of the software industry’s revenue. A startup that signed with OpenRouter specifically to avoid depending on a single model provider now depends on a single company for model access, billing, and the routing logic that decides which model sees its traffic. The

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18:43

Copyright Ruling Makes AI Coding Tool Indemnification...

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/10/04

The Copyright Office settled one question about AI generated code in its January 29, 2025 report and left the harder one standing: code a tool such as Cursor writes without a human supplying the expression cannot be copyrighted, but the report never says who bears the loss when that same code infringes somebody else’s copyright or patent. The District of Columbia Circuit closed the door on a related argument in Thaler v. Perlmutter on March 18, 2025, holding that human authorship is required as a

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11:51

California and New York Ban Algorithmic Price...

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/10/03

California Assembly Bill 325 and New York General Business Law Section 340-B, both in force by January 2026, prohibit two or more businesses from using a common pricing algorithm to set prices, rents, or wages, and both let a plaintiff win without proving the businesses ever spoke to each other directly. AB 325 amends the Cartwright Act to punish a company that distributes an algorithm built on competitor data or that coerces another company into following that algorithm’s recommendation. Section

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18:28

Nine Figure Series A Rounds

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/10/02

A term sheet for two hundred fifty five million dollars arrived at Fundamental in February 2026 pricing the company at a one point four billion dollar post money valuation, and the founders gave up about eighteen percent of the business, the same percentage a traditional fourteen million dollar Series A has cost founders for years. That single fact answers the question most founders are asking backward. The size of the check does not set the price of the round. The credibility of the valuation

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15:36

California Suspends Venture Capital Demographic...

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/10/02

California’s Department of Financial Protection and Innovation suspended enforcement of Senate Bill 54’s venture capital founder demographic reporting mandate on March 17, 2026, and told covered funds to pause all work related to reporting until further notice. The statute, codified at California Business and Professions Code section 22949.85, was six weeks from its April 1 reporting deadline when the department pulled it back for a rulemaking it expects to take about a year. A fund that spent the

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13:32

Accredited Investor Reform Reshapes Startup Secondary...

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/10/02

The Securities and Exchange Commission’s September 30, 2026, vote to open the accredited investor definition to professional credentials, not only income and net worth, lands on a capitalization table that already has fewer places to run a clean secondary sale. Carta closed its secondary trading desk in January 2024, and Pulley shuts down for good on December 8, 2026, so the same founders who are about to meet a larger buyer pool are doing it with two fewer platforms built to manage who actually

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