About

The Dysprosium Law Blog publishes commentary on developments in the law of artificial intelligence: regulation, litigation, agency guidance, and the slow but real reshaping of common-law doctrines around AI systems. We post roughly once a month, usually pegged to a specific event — a bill being signed, an enforcement action being filed, a guidance document landing — rather than to a calendar.

The blog began in May 2024, the week the EU AI Act received final approval in the Council. The premise then was that AI law was about to stop being a niche specialty and start being a normal part of how technology lawyers, employment lawyers, IP lawyers, and litigators worked. Two years in, that bet looks broadly correct, though the details have surprised us many times.

Editorial scope

We cover, in rough order of frequency:

• U.S. federal and state legislation and agency rulemaking
• The EU AI Act, GDPR-AI intersections, and other EU instruments (DSA, Product Liability Directive)
• Litigation — particularly copyright, defamation, product liability, and discrimination cases involving AI systems
• Sectoral guidance from agencies (FDA, EEOC, FTC, SEC, CFPB, NHTSA)
• Standards-body output where it has near-regulatory force (NIST AI RMF, ISO/IEC 42001)

We do not cover: pure technology commentary, capability speculation, or coverage of model releases except where they are legally significant.

Contributors

Eleanor Hartwell — Managing editor. Former senior associate in the technology transactions practice at a New York firm; now in-house. Writes the year-end retrospectives and most of the cross-jurisdictional pieces.

Marcus Chen — EU and UK coverage. Brussels-based; spent five years advising on the GDPR before pivoting to AI Act work in 2023. Most of our EU AI Act coverage is his.

Priya Vasquez — U.S. federal and state AI law. Previously a legislative counsel on the Hill, now in private practice. Tracks state legislation more closely than is healthy.

Daniel Okonkwo — Intellectual property. Litigator with a copyright background; covers the training-data lawsuits and the related licensing markets.

Sarah Brennan — Product liability and tort. Defense-side product liability practice; covers AI agent liability questions and the slow common-law reorganization happening underneath the statutory layer.

Name

Dysprosium is element 66, a rare-earth metal used in high-performance magnets including those in many GPUs and electric motors. We thought it was a more interesting metaphor than the obvious silicon ones.

Disclaimer

Nothing on this site is legal advice. Posts reflect the views of their individual authors and not their employers, clients, or anyone else. We make no warranty as to the accuracy or completeness of any post, and the law in this area moves quickly enough that any given post may be partially or fully obsolete by the time you read it.