Yesterday was about org charts. Today is about bills coming due — a nine-figure judgment against Meta with operational strings attached, a music generator conceding to watermarking under legal pressure, OpenAI arguing that Apple's own security practices sank its trade secrets case, and a free ChatGPT tier that no longer counts your messages.
Legal & Regulation
A New Mexico court ordered Meta to pay another $567M in its child safety case
Thursday's ruling brings Meta's total in this case to $942M, on top of the $375M ordered in March. The court found Meta created a "public nuisance." The money is the smaller half of the story — the order also forces product changes: Like counts hidden for under-18s without parental approval, push notifications to minors paused between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m., and youth usage capped at 90 hours a month. Meta says it will appeal. It still faces a consolidated 33-state suit in Oakland federal court.
OpenAI's defense against Apple: you didn't guard the secrets
OpenAI moved to dismiss, arguing Apple can't claim trade secret protection for information it failed to protect — Apple let employees use personal iCloud accounts for work and didn't revoke access after they left. The exhibits point to an Apple manager who stayed logged into former engineer Chang Liu's personal iCloud account after his departure, to transfer files. Apple had asked for expedited discovery on August 4 and says more ex-employees may have been involved. Reasonable-measures-to-protect-secrecy is an element of the claim, not a talking point, so this is a real defense rather than a deflection.
Suno says it will start watermarking songs
The company signed with Musixmatch to use its Sentinel copyright-detection system, and is adding fingerprinting plus download restrictions aimed at mass distribution to streaming platforms. No implementation date, and it hasn't said whether it will use Google's SynthID or roll its own. The timing isn't subtle: Suno is fighting UMG and Sony via the RIAA, lost a July ruling to Germany's GEMA, and is defending a class action over a November 2025 breach affecting 55 million users.
Consumer AI
ChatGPT dropped text chat limits for free users
Free and Go users move to GPT-5.6 Luna, with Plus and Pro getting GPT-5.6 Sol for quick tasks. OpenAI's internal evals claim 62% fewer factual errors for Luna versus GPT-5.5-Instant and 68% fewer for Sol — vendor-reported, so treat accordingly. Limits remain on files, images, voice, and image generation, which is where the real inference cost lives. Both tiers get a "Think" button; Plus and Pro get a slider for reasoning depth. ChatGPT recently passed 1 billion weekly active users, which makes uncapping text a genuinely large compute commitment.
OpenAI's smart speaker will reportedly cost $300–$400
Per Bloomberg: a screenless, donut-shaped metal device with moving parts, designed with Jony Ive's LoveFrom, expected in 2027. This is a report, not an announcement — no OpenAI confirmation of price or date. At $300–400 it would launch at roughly triple an Echo or Nest, betting that people will pay Apple-adjacent hardware prices for a voice assistant that's actually good.
Business
Naïve raised $28.5M to let agents run whole companies
Nexus Venture Partners led, with Y Combinator, Zetta, Liquid 2, and angels including Gokul Rajaram and former HubSpot COO JD Sherman; about $32M raised in total. The product puts incorporation, payments, email, phone numbers, cloud, and storage behind a single API, so a prompt in Cursor or Claude Code can stand up an LLC with a Stripe account attached. 30,000+ developer customers within months of launch, run-rate revenue up 10x in six months to low double-digit millions, on ten full-time employees.
Follow-Up
Meta priced Muse Code — and it's cheaper than it first looked
I covered Muse Code's launch yesterday and noted Meta was claiming a cost advantage without naming a number. The number is now public: $1.25 per million input tokens and $4.25 output on the standard tier, with cached input at $0.15, and Meta committing not to train on that tier's traffic. The agent runs on Muse Spark 1.2, not the 1.1 model I mentioned yesterday.
The more interesting line item is the contributor tier: $0.10 in / $0.20 out — about 12x and 21x cheaper — in exchange for explicit permission to train on your prompts and completions. That's an unusually direct price tag on developers' code as training data, and it's the part of this launch worth watching.
Sources
- TechCrunch — New Mexico court orders Meta to pay additional $567M in child safety case
- TechCrunch — OpenAI says Apple's own security practices undermine its trade secrets case
- TechCrunch — Amid legal battles, Suno says it will start watermarking songs
- TechCrunch — ChatGPT brings unlimited text chats to free users
- TechCrunch — OpenAI's new AI smart speaker will reportedly sell for between $300 and $400
- TechCrunch — Naïve raises $28.5M to automate the grunt work of setting up and running a company
- VentureBeat — Meta enters the AI coding wars with Muse Spark 1.2 and Muse Code
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