Tag: lawsuits

California-Certified Gay Government Procurement Program Challenged on Legal Grounds

The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) runs a procurement preference program for businesses owned by lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender individuals, operating under General Order 156. A business qualifies as an LGBT Business Enterprise if it is at least 51 percent owned and controlled by LGBT individuals.

In California, “utilities” are privately owned companies that hold near-monopolies delivering essential services such as electricity, natural gas, water, or internet and phone service, and are therefore regulated by the state through the CPUC. To operate, utilities purchase goods and services from outside vendors, construction, engineering, fuel, IT, and similar services.

Under CPUC’s Supplier Diversity Program, utilities are given goals for directing a share of that vendor spending to certified women-, minority-, disabled-veteran-, and LGBT-owned businesses, giving LGBT-certified firms a procurement advantage in competing for utility contracts.

There are both indirect and procedural incentives for utility compliance with CPUC’s LGBT procurement goals. The CPUC controls matters that are consequential to utilities, including rate approvals, infrastructure proceedings, and merger approvals.

One example is the Verizon-Frontier merger. A CPUC administrative law judge recommended approval of the $20 billion deal only if new diversity conditions were attached. This recommendation came even after Verizon had already committed to the FCC to eliminate its workforce and supplier-diversity goals.

Utilities that resist these procurement goals risk creating friction in these higher-stakes proceedings.

Compliance is also reinforced through reporting requirements. Utilities must file annual plans, collect demographic data on vendors, and explain in writing any shortfall against the stated goals.

Certified firms enter a supplier database administered by the Supplier Clearinghouse and used by participating utilities for procurement decisions, with certification valid for three years. CPUC’s category-specific contracting goals now stand at 15 percent for minority-owned firms, 5 percent for women-owned firms, 1.5 percent for disabled-veteran-owned firms, and 1.5 percent for LGBT-owned firms.

The LGBT category sits within a broader supplier-diversity framework dating to 1986, when Governor George Deukmejian signed Assembly Bill 3678, requiring CPUC-regulated utilities to submit annual plans for purchasing from woman- and minority-owned companies; CPUC created its Supplier Diversity Program two years later to enforce the law and set contracting goals. In September 2014, Governor Jerry Brown signed legislation requiring CPUC to recognize LGBT-owned businesses as eligible for supplier-diversity benefits, and the CPUC added LGBT businesses to General Order 156 the following year.

Governor Newsom expanded the program in 2019, encouraging energy-sector companies to award contracts to gay-owned firms. The LGBT procurement target phased in at 0.5 percent in 2022 and 1 percent in 2023, reaching the current 1.5 percent goal by unanimous CPUC vote in April 2022. During the rollout, advocacy groups pushed CPUC toward fuller implementation.

BuildOUT California, an LGBT building-industry organization since rebranded, told the commission that homophobia persisted within utility companies’ ranks, and the state legislature’s LGBTQ caucus wrote in 2021 that lowering gay-procurement targets would insult the LGBTQ+ community.

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Florida Sues TikTok Over Age Verification Failures as Digital ID Mandate Takes Effect

Florida wants every social media user in the state to prove how old they are. The method is up to the platforms and the options include government ID uploads, biometric face scans, payment credentials, and behavioral profiling. Now the state is suing TikTok for not doing it fast enough.

Attorney General James Uthmeier filed a 66-page complaint Monday in St. Lucie County Circuit Court, accusing TikTok of letting children under 14 create accounts, skipping parental consent for 14- and 15-year-olds, and lying to parents about what their kids actually see on the app.

The lawsuit names TikTok Inc., its parent company ByteDance and several related entities. It’s the first enforcement action under House Bill 3, Florida’s Online Protections for Minors Act, which took effect January 1, 2025 after spending two years tangled in court challenges.

We obtained a copy of the lawsuit for you here. 

HB 3 bans social media platforms with addictive design features from contracting with children 13 and younger and requires parental consent before 14- and 15-year-olds can open accounts.

Violations carry fines of $50,000 each. But to block minors, platforms first have to figure out who is and isn’t a minor, which means age-checking every user, adults included.

Florida is building an identity verification regime for the internet under the banner of protecting kids and the surveillance costs of that project land on millions of people who have done nothing wrong.

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FTC sues transgender health group for ‘misleading’ parents about necessity of transitioning kids

The Federal Trade Commission followed through on its nearly year-old pledge to crack down on allegedly false and misleading statements about so-called gender affirming care, suing the World Professional Association for Transgender Health in a Texas federal court known for friendliness to Republican attorneys general.

Texas, Iowa, Alaska and Nebraska joined the FTC in Wednesday’s lawsuit, alleging state-specific harms caused by WPATH, which was notably not cited by Democrats or their witnesses in a recent Senate hearing on pediatric gender medicine.

WPATH developed its Standards of Care 8 “without regard for scientific protocols,” “knows that its recommendations are not supported by scientific evidence or a medical consensus” and yet “misrepresents the risks and benefits of pediatric medical transition” by falsely claiming gender transitions for kids are “lifesaving,” the suit says. 

The Biden administration was caught after the fact successfully pressuring WPATH to remove age minimums in SOC-8, as the suit documents.

The group has an economic interest in pediatric gender transitions, as it advocates expanding insurance coverage to pay for them, “promotes the purchase of its members’ pediatric medical transition services” and financially benefits “by leveraging its position as the de facto authority on transition medicine in the United States,” the suit says.

“WPATH has provided to clinicians the means by which they deceive children and their parents into purchasing pediatric medical transition services,” it says.

The group also hid side effects from gender-affirming treatments, including “mood disturbances,” vaginal and erectile pain and “inability to orgasm” from cross-sex hormones, according to the FTC.

“For decades, the FTC has taken action against entities that make deceptive and unsubstantiated health-related claims,” Chairman Andrew Ferguson said. “The complaint filed today reflects that same long-standing mandate: when an entity makes a claim about a medical treatment, the claim must be truthful, evidence-based and not misleading.”

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Gun Shops File Lawsuit Against Colorado’s ‘Warrantless Searches’ and Gun Registry Requirements

A lawsuit brought by firearms dealers in Colorado is challenging a new law which implements “warrantless searches” and requires Federal Firearm License holders (FFLs) to maintain a gun registry.

The Courthouse News Service noted that the plaintiffs in the suit includes “the Centennial Gun Club, five firearms dealers and organizations.”

Defendants are Gov. Jared Polis (D), Attorney General Phil Weiser (D), and Colorado Department of Revenue executive director Heidi Humphreys.

The suit centers on HB26-1126, which Polis signed into law on June 2, 2026. The new law requires an FFL to also have a state firearms permit in order to transfer guns and broadens record-keeping requirements, so as to “apply to all retail transactions.” The record must contain “the name of the person that received the firearm and the recipient’s age and address.” This record-keeping becomes the registry and partial motivator for the current lawsuit.

Under HB26-1126, law enforcement can visit the FFL’s store and check the records and “the dealer shall make the records…available at all times for inspection by a duly authorized peace officer.”

The Courthouse News Service noted that “dealers who refuse to allow their records to be inspected can be charged with a class 2 misdemeanor.”

Moreover, in the lawsuit filed by the Centennial Gun Club and others, plaintiffs claim the searches violate privacy rights: “The Fourth Amendment broadly protects businesses from warrantless searches, including businesses engaged in commerce with customers who exercise no independent constitutional rights.”

Additionally, the lawsuit says: “The regime…injures plaintiffs’ customers, who face the prospect that their lawful firearms purchases will be surveilled without warrant protections, chilling the exercise of constitutionally protected rights.”

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Anthropic Accused In Lawsuit Of Lying About $200 Per Month ’20x’ Plan

A federal class-action lawsuit filed Monday accuses Anthropic of misleading customers about the real usage limits on its high-end Claude AI subscriptions. The suit, brought on behalf of Washington D.C. subscriber Karl Kahn and others who bought the Max 5x and Max 20x plans since April 2025, claims the company oversold how much computing power buyers would actually receive.

The lawsuit – filed Monday in the Northern District of California on behalf of Washington DC resident Karl Kahn and others who subscribed to the plans since April 2025 – targets Anthropic’s Max 5x and Max 20x tiers priced at $100 and $200 per month respectively. It accuses the company of misleading customers by advertising these plans as providing five and twenty times the usage capacity of the standard Pro subscription, when in reality the actual limits fall well short of those claims. The allegations draw heavily from emails Anthropic sent to subscribers in July 2025 that outlined the expected weekly usage allowances for each tier at the time.

According to the complaint, Kahn upgraded to the Max 20x plan in April of this year after increasing his reliance on Claude for coding work. He soon discovered he was exhausting his weekly limits rapidly, including burning through 15 percent of his allowance during a single five-hour session. The suit seeks refunds for affected customers and a judicial finding that Anthropic’s marketing of the high-tier plans was fraudulent.

Allegations

Kahn initially used Claude for personal tasks but later relied on it heavily for coding. After upgrading, he repeatedly hit usage walls and had to stop work, ration prompts, or buy extra credits to finish projects, according to the complaint. The lawsuit says the actual limits are difficult to predict and consistently lower than what was promised when the plans were marketed as giving five or twenty times the capacity of the standard Pro subscription.

“The actual usage provided by the Max 5x and Max 20x plans is far below the advertised amount of usage,” reads the lawsuit, that claims Kahn “found himself needing either to halt his work, ration his usage, or purchase additional usage to ensure that he could complete his work.” 

Anthropic has not commented on the suit, according to the Wall Street Journal. The company offers free access plus paid tiers, with the Pro plan running $17 to $20 a month. The higher Max plans were positioned for power users needing substantially more compute.

This lawsuit arrives amid mounting frustration with AI subscriptions and tokenomics. Power users and even large enterprises have complained for months about unpredictable rate limits, especially on coding workflows – with several documented cases of extreme overspending, including one unnamed Anthropic client (Amazon?) that racked up roughly $500 million in Claude charges in a single month after failing to cap employee usage.

Compute scarcity remains a core issue across the sector. A surge in demand earlier this year strained systems at Anthropic and rivals, producing outages and tighter limits even for paying customers. At the same time, companies are racing to launch new models ahead of expected IPOs while navigating new government restrictions. Days before this suit, the Trump administration banned foreign governments, companies, and individuals from accessing Anthropic’s most powerful models after Amazon discovered a way to jailbreak the company’s Fable AI into its unrestricted form – Mythos, forcing the company to shut off certain access to comply.

On Sunday, Anthropic execs scrambled to DC to triage the situation. 

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North Carolina Student Wins Massive Legal Settlement After School Accused Her of Vandalism Over Pro-Charlie Kirk Message Painted on Rock

A North Carolina high school student was accused of vandalism and investigated after she painted a pro-Charlie Kirk message on a rock on the school’s campus that has historically been used by students in this way.

Now the student is sitting on top of gigantic pile of money, having won a legal settlement over the way she was targeted for this.

There was absolutely nothing offensive in the messages she painted on the rock. The school only acted because the message was about Charlie Kirk. The student’s First Amendment rights were violated.

FOX News reports:

North Carolina student wins $95K after school accused her of vandalizing spirit rock with Charlie Kirk tribute

A North Carolina high school student has reached a $95,000 settlement with her school district after she was publicly accused of vandalism and told she was under police investigation. The controversy revolved around painting a campus “spirit rock” with a Bible verse and patriotic message in tribute to the late Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk.

Fox News Digital has learned that a settlement was reached this week between the family of Ardrey Kell High School student Gabby Stout and the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education. Under the terms of the agreement, the school board will adopt a new free speech policy, issue a public statement expressing regret, and pay $95,000 to Stout’s legal team at Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF).

The settlement comes six months after the Stouts filed a federal lawsuit alleging rampant violations of the student’s First Amendment rights.

Stout told Fox News Digital the settlement ultimately clears her name.

“This settlement finally reinforces that I did nothing wrong, and the school system has to admit that publicly,” she said. “After I got permission to paint a message sharing my faith in God, school officials accused me of vandalism in front of my whole school and my entire community. Then they put me through an unfair investigation. They never should have treated me this way, and by saying they regret that I had this experience, they are finally acknowledging that publicly.”

This was an expensive lesson for the school.

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Federal Court Strikes Down Landmark Fluoride Ruling on Technicality — ‘Not the Science’

Citing a procedural question, a federal appeals court has vacated a landmark decision that found fluoridated drinking water poses an “unreasonable risk” to children’s health. The court sent the case back to the district judge and ordered him to ignore any scientific evidence uncovered after 2020. Attorney Michael Connett told The Defender the court instructed the judge “to travel back in time to 2020 and make this ruling based on a stale factual record.”

A federal appeals court has vacated a landmark decision that found fluoridated drinking water poses an “unreasonable risk” to children’s health under the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA).

The decision by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals did not challenge the substance of the lower court’s findings — that fluoride is toxic to children and ought to be regulated. Instead, the court based its decision on procedural issues related to the lower court’s handling of the litigation.

The case will now go back to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, where District Judge Edward Chen will be required to exclude all scientific evidence that became available after 2020.

Michael Connett, attorney for the plaintiffs, told The Defender the court “instructed Judge Chen to travel back in time to 2020 and make this ruling based on a stale factual record.”

Connett said the directive to ignore years’ worth of evidence on fluoride’s dangers runs counter to the intent of the TSCA — which is to protect hundreds of millions of Americans from substances that are harmful to human health.

The federal appeals court ruling, handed down late Thursday, stemmed from a lawsuit against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) brought by consumer advocacy groups including Food & Water Watch, the Fluoride Action Network (FAN), and Moms Against Fluoridation.

The groups sued after the EPA refused to consider their 2016 citizens’ petition asking the agency to regulate fluoride.

After two bench trials, Chen ruled that fluoride at the federally recommended concentration of 0.7 milligrams/liter (mg/L) posed an “unreasonable risk” to children’s health and ordered the EPA to regulate it accordingly.

However, the 9th Circuit panel said the lower court violated the “party presentation principle” — a legal doctrine requiring courts to act as neutral arbiters rather than taking control of a case’s factual development.

Connett said the decision was “a very expansive and unprecedented application of the party presentation principle.” He said that to date, “this principle has really only been applied to situations where judges raise new legal issues, not where judges use procedural mechanisms to resolve the issues presented.”

Under the TSCA, if the EPA denies a citizen petition, petitioners have the right to sue the agency. The law is unique because it specifies that the court then evaluates whether the chemical in question presents an unreasonable risk to health or the environment in a “de novo” proceeding, during which it evaluates evidence presented by both sides and gives no deference to the agency.

Rather than ruling after the first trial in 2020, Chen put the trial on hold, pending the release of a multiyear government study into fluoride’s neurotoxic effects, so he could base his decision on all available evidence.

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Palisades Fire Victims Beat Gavin Newsom in Court AGAIN

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has been playing hide the ball with the truth about the disastrous and deadly Pacific Palisades fire and the state’s culpability in it since it rekindled on Jan. 7, 2025. This week, the governor lost another court maneuver in his attempt to deny Palisades fire victims the ability to sue the the State of California. 

On Friday, the California Supreme Court denied Newsom administration’s latest stall tactic, that would have required yet another “review and request to stay the Palisades Fire Litigation,” according to Trey Robertson, who represents 4,000 Palisades victims. If the court had decided differently, those victims would have been completely iced out of their efforts to seek relief… and discovery. 

We’ve already seen the state run from liability in the case, but the secrets that would pour out from discovery in a court case of this kind could fill that entire empty Pacific Palisades reservoir. It’s still empty, by the way. 

The State of California has the right to defend itself against liability in the fire, of course. But there’s something else at play here. Newsom’s administration has fought the thousands of victims every step of the way as they seek  what could be billions of dollars in damages from the state’s complicity.  

The decision means that “justice is coming for the Palisades Fire victims,” Robertson said in an X post. 

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Canadian Mother Sues OpenAI, Alleging Chatbot Encouraged Daughter’s Suicide

A Canadian mother is suing OpenAI after its popular ChatGPT chatbot allegedly encouraged her daughter to continue engaging with the app after she revealed suicidal thoughts.

Instead of terminating these discussions or flagging her account for safety concerns, ChatGPT allegedly escalated the exchanges in the days before the woman ultimately took her life, according to a press release.

The Social Media Victims Law Center, Tech Justice Law, and the firm Susman Godfrey filed a lawsuit in San Francisco County Superior Court against OpenAI on June 11 on behalf of Kristie Carrier.

Her daughter, Alice Carrier, 24, committed suicide on July 2, 2025. After reviewing her daughter’s devices, Kristie Carrier said she had found extensive conversations with ChatGPT in which her daughter expressed thoughts of self-harm in the months before her death.

In the exchanges, her daughter allegedly told the chatbot that she was feeling isolated and discussed possible suicide methods. The lawsuit accuses ChatGPT of escalating these conversations in the days before the woman’s suicide, rather than terminating the exchange or flagging her account “for human intervention,” the press release states.

These exchanges allegedly encouraged Alice Carrier to continue engaging with ChatGPT, causing “her further isolation from her human support system and ultimately, suicide,” according to a press release.

“If a person came up to me, and they were clearly in distress and sharing their thoughts of suicide, I would be expected to help them, not encourage them to fixate on their depressive thoughts or isolate themselves,” Kristie Carrier said in the press release.

“The same should be true of OpenAI. Instead, OpenAI has chosen to put out a product that was unsafe, and that they knew was unsafe but they did so without any concern for the consequences of their choices. Sam Altman can continue to go about his life normally, but my life is missing a child. This is unacceptable,” she added.

OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.

This is not the first time, nor the second time, a parent has sued OpenAI, accusing its chatbot of encouraging their child to commit suicide.

Last year, the Social Media Victims Law Center and the Tech Justice Law Project filed seven lawsuits against the AI giant, claiming ChatGPT had isolated multiple users from their support systems, and in some cases, coached the victims into taking their own lives.

Matthew Raine testified to Congress in September 2025 after suing OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman.

Raine alleged that his son, Adam, took his own life after ChatGPT mentioned suicide more than 1,200 times to the 16-year-old. He accused ChatGPT of offering specific methods to his son on how to die by suicide, and continuing to validate and encourage the boy’s feelings.

“As parents, you cannot imagine what it’s like to read a conversation with a chatbot that groomed your child to take his own life,” Raine told lawmakers at the time.

Justin Nelson, a partner at Susman Godfrey, said on June 11 that OpenAI’s “deliberate design decisions” led to Alice Carrier’s suicide.

“Instead of providing help, OpenAI encouraged suicidal behavior. This lawsuit is about accountability for OpenAI’s actions,” he said in the press release.

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Washington Post Slapped with Class Action Over Secret ‘Surveillance Pricing’ Scheme That Charged Readers Different Rates

The Washington Post has been hit with a class action lawsuit alleging the newspaper secretly used readers’ personal data to charge different subscription prices.

CourtHouse News reports that the lawsuit accuses the Bezos-owned outlet of creating “pricing profiles” based on subscribers’ reading habits, demographics, browsing activity, and other personal information.

The lawsuit, which was filed in the Superior Court of Washington, D.C., states:

The Post has been monitoring usage and implementing this pricing practice, often referred to as ‘surveillance pricing’ since at least December 2024, at which point not a single subscriber was aware of The Post’s surveillance pricing or secret harvesting of subscriber data.

The law does not allow this conduct. State attorneys general across the country along with the Federal Trade Commission have begun investigating companies that engage in ‘surveillance pricing’ (also referred to as ‘algorithmic pricing’) using consumer personal information instead of market forces to set individualized prices.

According to the plaintiffs, the practice only became public after New York required companies to disclose when algorithms use consumer data to set individualized prices.

Subscribers reportedly discovered they were being offered dramatically different rates for the same product.

One reader claimed a renewal jumped from $170 to $260, while another obtained a subscription for just $60.

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