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A New Mexico attorney is facing serious scrutiny after using ChatGPT to draft legal briefs in a murder appeal — briefs that contained entirely fabricated witnesses and invented testimony. When judges caught the errors, attorney Stephen Aarons offered a candid if bleak explanation, telling the court that his own stupidity was what brought them together that afternoon. It's the latest reminder that AI tools can fail catastrophically when deployed without human oversight in high-stakes settings.
Meanwhile, the federal government is making a major move to control the fast-growing prediction markets industry. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has sent the White House two new rule proposals that would classify event contracts as swaps, bringing them firmly under federal jurisdiction — and drawing a line between legitimate markets and what regulators are calling casino-style gambling products. The timing is notable, as several states are actively suing prediction market operators over gambling law violations.
And in the world of AI investment, voice synthesis startup ElevenLabs has doubled its valuation to twenty-two billion dollars following a three-hundred-million-dollar employee tender offer co-led by Wellington and T. Rowe Price. The company's rapid ascent reflects just how much appetite remains among institutional investors for infrastructure plays in the generative AI space.
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