Jeff Kohler was working as a software engineer in 2005 when he started spending his nights and weekends on a side project: a web conferencing system that could record and replay live sessions. He filed for a patent without the help of a patent attorney, stuffing two CDs full of C++ source code into the application to show his work.

The patent was issued in 2010, and years later, after Kohler had joined Microsoft, the Redmond company licensed his technology for its Teams video-conferencing platform.

When YouTube later added the ability for viewers to pause, rewind, and change the playback speed of live video, Kohler saw in the feature what he considered to be his own invention. Kohler, who lives in Bellevue, Wash., sued Google for patent infringement in U.S. District Court in Seattle in April 2023.

But rather than defending the feature’s originality, Google argued that Kohler’s patent was too abstract to be eligible for patent protection. The district court agreed and dismissed the case, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed that decision.

Both decisions cited Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International, a 2014 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that raised the bar for software patent eligibility by holding that an inventor cannot patent an “abstract idea” implemented with generic technology.

Since then, Alice has been used to invalidate thousands of software patents, and the Supreme Court has repeatedly declined to revisit the standard. Now, Kohler is asking the Supreme Court to take up his case, not to overturn Alice, but to clarify how courts should apply it.

“The patent legal system has become hostile to inventors,” Kohler said. “Because of Alice, my case got stopped before it even started.”

How Alice changed patent law

When Alice was handed down, patent trolls were on the rise: shadowy entities that bought vague patents to sue tech companies on shaky claims of patent infringement. 

That changed under the 2014 ruling, which requires that a patent clear two hurdles: the idea cannot be “abstract,” and it must propose a sufficiently “inventive concept.” The standard has become “a crucial tool” for fighting patent trolls, in the words of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

But critics say it’s ill-suited to software patents. Because software inventions often rely on pre-existing hardware to run the source code, courts tend to find many of these patents to be insufficiently inventive.

Jon McMichael, an IP lawyer who has written about Kohler’s case, said this challenge is common in patents where inventors rely on general-purpose computers and off-the-shelf hardware to implement their ideas. 

“That’s where those patent holders run into more problems,” he said.

Experts say the courts’ application of Alice has broadened to invalidate the patents of real inventors in addition to those of patent trolls. Toshiko Takenaka, a University of Washington IP law professor who is working on an academic paper about Kohler’s case, said Alice’s ability to quickly defeat bad actors comes “at the expense of the best inventors.”

“Software patents are too frequently being invalidated without giving the owner the opportunity to defend it,” Takenaka said. “This inventor provided something ordinary computers could not do, right? So therefore, in my view, this is an eligible invention.”

Some judges have raised similar concerns, including Federal Circuit Chief Judge Kimberly Moore, who authored the opinion affirming the dismissal of Kohler’s case. In a 2020 concurrence in a separate case, Moore wrote that she and her fellow judges were “unanimous in our unprecedented plea for guidance” from the Supreme Court on how to interpret Alice, which she called a “patent-killing judicial exception of our own creation.”

A quest for legal clarity

After filing his patent, Kohler spent more than 15 years at Microsoft, where he helped launch HoloLens and rose to senior director of product management for the Surface line. He later served as a product leader at Meta for its Horizon platform.

Kohler says he’s hopeful the Supreme Court will agree to hear his case because his petition takes a new approach, asking the court to clarify how to apply the Alice test rather than disputing the test entirely. His new attorney, Kathryn Jean Miller, who does not have prior patent law experience, was admitted to practice before the Supreme Court bar for this case.

“It’s me and my lawyer against the world,” Kohler said. “I never thought I would be doing something like this.”

The Supreme Court has declined more than 89 petitions related to Alice, some of which had the Solicitor General’s endorsement. The justices will decide on Sept. 28 whether to hear Kohler’s case and likely announce their decision the following week.

Kohler is hoping that other inventors will file amicus briefs, which are due by Sept. 23, to illustrate to the court the need for clarification.

“There’s a broad coalition of people who would like some sanity brought back to patent law, from small inventors and startups to former judges,” Kohler said. “That’s what I’m trying to do with my petition.”

Military officials are using medical and personnel data to uncover troops with current or past gender dysphoria as the Pentagon moves ahead with separations.

© The Associated Press

A former UK competition official has filed a $2.7 billion lawsuit against Apple on behalf of app developers, alleging its App Tracking Transparency rules unfairly disadvantaged third-party apps while favoring Apple's own advertising ecosystem. Engadget reports: ATT debuted in 2021, ostensibly to give users more control over how much of their activity app developers can track across other apps and websites. The company told Reuters it was "bound by the exact same requirements as all developers." However, regulators across Europe including in France, Italy and Poland have investigated ATT. Germany's competition regulator, the Federal Cartel Office, last month determined that Apple was favoring its own apps over those from external developers. It said the ATT pop-ups Apple used for its services "had the potential to encourage users to give their consent, whereas they had the potential to discourage consent for third-party apps." As such, the company agreed to make some changes to how ATT works in the European Union. That follows the French Competition Authority fining Apple $175 million at current rates over ATT last year.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Michele Spagnuolo, the Google engineer arrested in May by U.S. authorities for alleged insider trading on Polymarket, is making a new bold bet. On Wednesday, his legal team filed a motion to dismiss the charges against him. Spagnuolo isn't outright denying that he made money using internal information from Google. Instead, his legal team says that the wagers were not financial instruments subject to regulation by the United States' Commodities Exchange Act but rather good old-fashioned international betting that the U.S. has no authority over. Spagnuolo, who has been placed on leave from Google, is accused of committing commodities fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering. Using the alias "AlphaRaccoon," he allegedly made a series of wagers on Polymarket's flagship platform that resulted in profits totaling over $1.2 million. According to the criminal complaint, "AlphaRaccoon" correctly wagered that the singer D4vd, who gained notoriety for his suspected connection to a grisly killing, would be Google's most-searched person of the year in 2025. (D4vd was later charged with murder; he pleaded not guilty.) [...] Spagnuolo's lawyers argue that defining swaps to include wagers like who the most-searched person on Google will be each year "would fly in the face of the statute's purpose and history" and lead to "absurd results." They say it would make it so that any wager in the world, from a charity raffle to a local Ping-Pong match, could be classified as a financial instrument. "Spagnuolo is basically making the same argument as the states that are suing prediction markets," says a financial services regulation expert Todd Phillips. "This is the issue that will likely go up to the Supreme Court." Featured Video In addition to disputing the idea that prediction markets offer swaps, Spagnuolo's legal team argues that the U.S. government had no jurisdiction over him in the first place because he's a non-U.S. citizen who was wagering on a non-U.S. platform. Although Polymarket is headquartered in New York, the company's flagship prediction market is banned in the United States and technically is administered by an ostensibly Panama-based entity known as Adventure One QSS. Spagnuolo was living in Zurich, Switzerland, when he allegedly made the Google-related trades on Polymarket. "The extraterritorial argument is interesting and raises the question of whether the U.S. should be the world's prediction markets cop," Philipps says. Spagnuolo's team also claims that the charges should be dismissed because the internal information he supposedly leveraged did not have any commercial value to Google.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Alphabet's Google escaped a breakup of its advertising technology business on Wednesday, when a judge in Virginia rejected U.S. antitrust enforcers' bid to force a sale of Google's online advertising exchange. While the ad exchange is a small part of Google's business, the ruling is the second powerful symbolic victory against the U.S. Department of Justice in its efforts to force Google to sell assets to address illegal monopolies. U.S. Judge Leonie Brinkema in Alexandria, Virginia, declined to make Google sell AdX, where publishers pay Google a 20% fee to sell ads in auctions that happen instantly when users load websites. She accepted most of the parties' proposed behavioral remedies. The DOJ and a broad coalition of states sued Google in 2023 over its dominance in markets for advertising technology used by online publishers and websites. In April 2025, Brinkema ruled that Google holds illegal monopolies on servers that host publisher ads and ad exchanges which sit between buyers and sellers. Google unlawfully locked publishers on its ad server into using its AdX, the judge found. The tech giant's anticompetitive conduct "substantially harmed Google's publisher customers, the competitive process, and, ultimately, consumers of information on the open web," Brinkema said at the time. At a trial last year on remedies in the case, the DOJ argued that Google cannot be trusted to run AdX, given its past behavior. Google argued that a forced sale would be technically difficult and result in a long and painful transition that would hurt customers. During the remedies trial, Google's lawyers warned that forcing it to sell parts of its ad-tech business would cause disruption and damage. [...] The ruling is the third time in a row that a judge has rejected a bid by U.S. antitrust enforcers to break up Big Tech in a crackdown that started during President Donald Trump's first term. In another major Google antitrust case, a judge similarly rejected the DOJ's push to force Google to sell Chrome. It is likely to fuel questions about whether courts are up to the task of checking the industry's unprecedented power over the U.S. economy.

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The FTC and 22 state attorneys general are suing Amazon, accusing the company of secretly inflating advertising prices through undisclosed changes to its auction system that may have extracted more than $20 billion from advertisers since 2019. "Amazon has millions of advertising customers who were misled into paying significantly higher prices," FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson said in a statement. "These higher costs were largely passed on to American consumers." CNBC reports: The complaint, which was filed in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, centers on Amazon's sponsored products ads, brands ads and display ads that run alongside search results on its sprawling webstore. Amazon has amassed the third-largest digital advertising business globally, trailing only Google and Meta. The company hauled in more than $68 billion in ads revenue last year, with the lion's share coming from sales of sponsored products ads. Third-party sellers who hawk their wares on Amazon's marketplace have recently criticized surging advertising costs on the site, including a string of recent policy changes, which led to some top merchants withholding their ad spend in a boycott. The company has traditionally used a "second-price" auction system, wherein it told advertisers they "only pay the least bid amount needed in order to win," the complaint states, citing Amazon's own marketing materials. The FTC alleges in its complaint that Amazon in 2019 changed its auction rules without notice by adding an undisclosed surcharge it referred to as a "soft reserve price," which led to higher ad prices. "Amazon made this surreptitious change to its auction because it was unhappy about how much revenue its advertising auctions were generating," the agency said in its complaint, which cites internal communications between Amazon ad executives. In one exchange, a company executive allegedly acknowledged it uses an "invented auction participant" to increase prices, the FTC said. The FTC and the states alleged Amazon's practices violate federal and state consumer protection laws, and they're seeking civil penalties, restitution and other unspecified damages. In a blog post, Amazon called the FTC's lawsuit "misguided" and said the complaint "fundamentally misunderstands how advertisers operate." The company added that the agency's lawsuit doesn't include evidence of consumer price increases. "We've provided advertisers with guidance about our auctions and pricing in the main tools they use to manage their campaigns, and we continue to update that guidance," the company said. "We look forward to making our case in court."

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A federal appeals court has ruled that states can regulate prediction markets like Kalshi as gambling, handing state regulators their biggest legal victory yet against the booming industry. "There are still related lawsuits pending across the country, and legal experts believe the matter will ultimately be settled by the Supreme Court," reports CNN. "But Friday's ruling from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals is the largest courtroom victory to date for the states as they seek to regulate prediction sites." CNN reports: The 3-0 ruling came from a panel of three Trump-appointed judges. The case originated from Nevada, where regulators tried to shut down the Kalshi prediction site. [...] "The substance of the sports event contracts offered on Kalshi's (exchange) is sports gambling, regardless of whether Kalshi calls them swaps," the appeals panel wrote Friday, adding that "Kalshi's attempts to distinguish its sports event contracts from sportsbooks betting are unpersuasive." The judges also said it was "disingenuous" for Kalshi to argue in court that its products weren't sports-betting when it previously used that phrasing in marketing materials. Kalshi spokeswoman Dani Lever said in a statement: "Despite the Ninth Circuit's opinion, we still believe the CFTC regulations as written do not prohibit sports contracts, and in any event, the CFTC is working to clarify those regulations. We will be seeking further review." "It's the first ruling against Kalshi at the appellate level, and the opinion seemed to be pretty brutal for the company," said Dustin Gouker, an independent journalist who covers the prediction industry. "This gets us one step closer to an almost inevitable Supreme Court case on the legality of sports event contracts."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A US judge ruled on Thursday that the Trump administration broke the law when it designated Anthropic as a supply chain risk earlier this year, finding that the government had unlawfully targeted the AI firm for refusing to comply with defense department demands. "The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics," Judge Rita Lin said in a 59-page decision. Lin's ruling barred the federal agencies named in the lawsuit from enforcing Donald Trump's order to stop using Anthropic's tools and overturned the designation of the company as a "supply chain risk" by the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth. The status, usually reserved for foreign firms, would have blocked government agencies from doing business with Anthropic. The case emerged out of a months-long feud between Anthropic and the Pentagon at the start of the year. Anthropic refused to allow the government to use its Claude AI model for fully autonomous lethal weapons or domestic mass surveillance, resulting in Hegseth accusing the company of "arrogance and betrayal". Lin put a temporary pause on the government's punitive measures in March, stating that the government's actions looked like an attempt to "cripple Anthropic" for exercising its first amendment rights. The ruling this week makes that temporary suspension permanent, although the government may appeal. "We welcome the court's ruling that this supply chain risk designation was unlawful," an Anthropic spokesperson said.

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Republican campaign committees want the Supreme Court to mandate lower prices for election commercials on broadcast TV stations. If the court agrees, broadcasters would be forced to offer their lowest ad prices to political parties and joint fundraising committees.

For a more thorough description of the legal issues in the dispute, see this article that Ars published yesterday. In short, US law requires broadcasters to offer individual candidates the “lowest unit charge,” or LUC, during the 60 days before an election. The law helps level the playing field somewhat by letting candidates make their cases to voters who watch broadcast TV without needing to raise exorbitant sums of money.

The Trump administration, acting through the Federal Communications Commission, ordered broadcast TV stations to also give these discounts to political parties and joint fundraising committees, which face fewer limits on how much money they can raise and spend. Four Democratic candidates appealed, and a judges’ panel at the US Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit ruled that the FCC order cannot be enforced because it contradicts the plain language of US law.

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Meta has agreed to pay up to $18 billion and make major changes to Facebook and Instagram to settle claims from most U.S. states that the platforms were designed to addict children and misled users about their safety. For the next decade, teens will be limited to two hours a day and blocked from using the apps between midnight and 6 a.m. without parental consent. Meta will, however, still be allowed to use personalized recommendations and targeted advertising. Reuters reports: The settlements include more than $17.6 billion of payments to 48 U.S. states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands. Meta will also pay $459 million to resolve states' privacy claims related to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where the British consulting firm collected personal data of millions of Facebook users. California would receive the highest payout, $2.2 billion, and New York and Texas would each receive more than $1 billion. Some of the payout is contingent on whether Alphabet's YouTube and ByteDance's TikTok impose similar protections for children. [...] The settlement requires approval by U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who oversaw the trial that began on August 18. Gonzalez Rogers still oversees thousands of lawsuits by individuals, school districts, and state and local governments accusing social media companies of harming children. Meta itself still faces thousands of lawsuits by individuals, school districts and municipalities. The next trials are slated for October in Los Angeles.

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A federal judge has allowed parts of an investor class-action lawsuit against Coinbase and certain executives to proceed, keeping allegations over risk disclosures alive in court.

US District Judge Katherine Polk Failla ruled on August 20 that some claims could move into discovery. The court dismissed several claims but allowed allegations that Coinbase misled investors by concealing potential bankruptcy risks and downplaying SEC scrutiny to proceed.

The ruling is procedural.

It does not mean Coinbase has been found liable. It does not prove wrongdoing. It means the plaintiffs cleared enough of an early legal hurdle for certain claims to continue.

TL;DR

• A federal judge allowed parts of a Coinbase investor class action to proceed.
• The claims center on risk disclosures tied to bankruptcy and SEC scrutiny.
• The ruling does not decide liability.

Why The Case Matters

Coinbase is one of the most important public companies in crypto.

Its disclosures, risk factors, regulatory statements, and investor communications are watched closely by both traditional markets and digital asset investors. A securities class action against the company therefore has broader relevance.

The case goes to a familiar question.

How much risk must crypto companies disclose, and how clearly must they explain regulatory uncertainty to investors?

That question has become more important as crypto firms operate in public markets, face agency scrutiny, and deal with fast-changing rules.

Risk Disclosure Is The Core Issue

The surviving claims reportedly concern whether Coinbase adequately disclosed certain risks.

Investors say the company concealed or downplayed potential bankruptcy-related concerns and regulatory scrutiny. Coinbase can still defend itself, and the facts remain contested.

But the court’s decision means those claims can proceed into discovery.

Discovery matters because it can force production of documents, communications, internal analysis, and testimony. That process can be expensive and revealing, even if a company ultimately wins.

Public Crypto Companies Face A Higher Bar

Private crypto firms can often operate with limited disclosure.

Public companies cannot. They must file risk factors, financial statements, management discussion, legal updates, and material event disclosures. Investors rely on those filings when buying shares.

That creates legal exposure.

If plaintiffs believe a company misrepresented risks or omitted material information, they may bring securities claims. Courts then decide which claims are strong enough to proceed.

Coinbase is not alone in facing this type of scrutiny, but its position makes the case especially visible.

No Liability Finding Yet

The caution is essential.

A motion-stage ruling is not a verdict. The court did not conclude that Coinbase misled investors. It only allowed certain allegations to continue.

Many class actions narrow over time.

Claims can be dismissed later, settled, or defeated after discovery. Coinbase can still challenge the allegations and defend its disclosures.

Markets should not treat the ruling as proof of wrongdoing.

Why Crypto Regulation Remains Central

The case also shows how regulatory uncertainty can become a securities-law issue.

If a crypto company’s business depends heavily on regulatory treatment, investors may argue that regulatory risk is material. Companies then need to describe that risk clearly enough that investors understand the potential impact.

That is difficult in crypto because rules can shift quickly.

SEC scrutiny, exchange registration questions, custody concerns, staking services, token listings, and bankruptcy treatment can all affect business models.

Coinbase operates directly inside that uncertainty.

What Comes Next

The case now moves forward on the surviving claims.

Discovery will determine what evidence the plaintiffs can obtain and how Coinbase responds. The company may later seek dismissal, summary judgment, settlement, or trial depending on how the case develops.

For now, the key takeaway is narrow but important.

Coinbase has not been found liable, but it must continue defending parts of an investor lawsuit over risk disclosures.

That keeps public-company crypto disclosure standards in the spotlight.

This article is based on filings and court materials from the Southern District of New York.

This article was written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.

This report is based on information released in disclosures at primary source documentation.

A US appeals court has allowed a proposed Binance-related theft lawsuit to proceed in federal court, rejecting a lower-court order that had forced the plaintiffs into arbitration.

The Eleventh Circuit issued an extraordinary writ of mandamus on August 19, directing the lower court to vacate its arbitration order. The panel found that the eight alleged crypto theft victims had never opened Binance accounts and therefore were not bound by Binance’s Terms of Use.

That is an important procedural ruling.

It does not mean Binance has been found liable. It does not prove RICO or anti-money-laundering allegations. It only determines that the plaintiffs can pursue the case in federal court rather than being forced into arbitration.

TL;DR

• The Eleventh Circuit allowed eight alleged crypto theft victims to pursue claims in federal court.
• The panel found they were not bound by Binance’s arbitration terms because they never opened Binance accounts.
• The ruling is procedural and does not decide liability.

Why Arbitration Was The Key Issue

Many online platforms include arbitration clauses in their terms.

Those clauses can require users to resolve disputes privately instead of suing in court. Companies often prefer arbitration because it can reduce litigation costs, limit class-action risk, and keep disputes out of public court proceedings.

But arbitration usually depends on agreement.

If someone never opened an account and never accepted the terms, the argument that they must arbitrate becomes weaker.

That appears to be the issue in this case.

The plaintiffs argued they were victims of crypto theft and did not agree to Binance’s user terms. The appeals court agreed that forcing arbitration under those terms was improper.

Why This Matters For Crypto Platforms

Crypto theft cases often involve complicated chains of transactions, exchanges, wallets, and intermediaries.

Victims may claim stolen funds passed through major platforms even if they were never customers of those platforms. Exchanges, meanwhile, may argue that claims connected to their services should be handled under platform terms.

The Eleventh Circuit ruling limits how far that argument can reach.

If non-users are not bound by platform terms, they may have more room to pursue claims in court. That could matter in future theft, laundering, fraud, and tracing cases.

It does not guarantee those plaintiffs will win. It simply keeps the courthouse door open.

The Allegations Still Need To Be Proven

The lawsuit reportedly includes serious allegations, including RICO and anti-money-laundering compliance claims against Binance-related defendants.

But allegations are not findings.

The court did not rule that Binance laundered funds, violated RICO, or caused the plaintiffs’ losses. It only addressed whether the plaintiffs could be compelled to arbitrate.

That distinction is essential.

Crypto litigation headlines can easily make procedural rulings sound like judgments on the facts. This ruling is about venue and consent, not liability.

A Wider Compliance Signal

Even though the ruling is procedural, it still adds pressure to exchanges.

Major platforms are already under scrutiny from regulators, plaintiffs, and law enforcement over transaction monitoring, sanctions compliance, fraud controls, and the movement of stolen assets.

A federal case moving forward can create discovery, public filings, and legal risk.

That may encourage platforms to keep strengthening compliance systems, especially around suspicious flows and account activity linked to hacks or scams.

What Comes Next

The case now returns to federal court unless further review changes the outcome.

The plaintiffs still need to prove their claims. Defendants can still challenge the allegations, seek dismissal, contest class certification, and defend the case on the merits.

For now, the key point is narrower.

The appeals court found that alleged victims who never opened Binance accounts could not be forced into arbitration based on account terms they did not accept.

That gives the case a path forward in federal court — and adds another legal development to the growing list of crypto exchange liability battles.

This article is based on the Eleventh Circuit’s mandamus ruling and related court materials.

This article was written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.

This report is based on information released in disclosures at primary source documentation.

The tradition of using new technology to shape political discourse goes back centuries in America, to the printing presses that enabled the spread of early publications like Common Sense and the Federalist Papers. Just imagine what Thomas Paine and Alexander Hamilton could have done with access to LLMs and a modest budget of AI tokens.

It might have looked something like Culliton2026.org.

No, a website that uses artificial intelligence to assess Washington state’s Supreme Court races won’t go down in history alongside the publications that helped launch a revolution and ratify a constitution. But at a basic level, its creator is attempting the same thing: reaching people at a key moment of decision, using the most powerful tools of the day.

The modern-day pamphleteer is Viet Nguyen, a veteran Seattle-based technology communications executive and former political campaign manager.

He built the interactive website using AI to give voters a sense of how each candidate for the state’s high court — starting with those in the Tuesday, Aug. 4, primary — might rule on the state’s new “millionaires’ tax.” Its core feature lets visitors swap in different judicial candidates to see how the outcome could tip the court in either direction, depending on who’s elected.

The site is named after Culliton v. Chase, the 1933 ruling that struck down a graduated income tax in Washington state. The new tax, which some tech and business leaders have warned could drive high earners and businesses out of state, may test that precedent.

Nguyen opposes the new tax — which would apply a 9.9% statewide levy on income above $1 million — and wrote a Seattle Times op-ed calling it unconstitutional. (He noted that he has run political campaigns on both sides of the aisle, and wouldn’t owe the tax himself.) 

For each of the 16 candidates across the five races, the site gives a one-line read: likely to keep the landmark ruling, likely to scrap it, or too close to call. The analysis uses four criteria: who appointed the candidate, what they did before reaching the bench, how they describe their own judicial approach, and anything they’ve said or written about Culliton or the new tax.

“People don’t understand who their Supreme Court justices are,” Nguyen said, describing his motivation. “There’s just zero knowledge about where judges stand on a particular issue.”

A faulty premise? But that very proposition — that anyone or anything can forecast how a judge will rule — is exactly what critics dispute. In a fact-check published last week, Andrew Villeneuve of the Northwest Progressive Institute (NPI), which supports the tax, described Nguyen’s Culliton2026.org as “speculation dressed up as a voter’s guide.” 

Judicial-ethics rules bar candidates from saying how they would rule on a case that could come before them. Hugh Spitzer, a retired University of Washington law professor and a leading authority on Culliton, told Villeneuve it isn’t possible to predict how the justices would rule.

“Rather than examining and scoring the candidates on a rubric of qualifications or issues, Nguyen has organized his whole project around attempting to guess how each candidate would rule in a single legal challenge that is not yet before the justices,” wrote Villeneuve, the organization’s founder and executive director, in the article.

NPI runs its own guide to the 2026 Supreme Court elections — the Washington State Supreme Court Elections Visualizer — which sorts candidates by their endorsements and voter-pamphlet statements, but does not make any guess at how they’d rule. 

Culliton2026.org is described on its About Page as independent and nonpartisan. It says it doesn’t endorse candidates, isn’t affiliated with any campaign, and isn’t telling people how to vote.

Despite the site’s flagship feature — the “Balance of power” tool that lets visitors swap in candidates and watch the projected ruling shift — the About Page asserts that the site is “not a vote predictor” when it comes to how future Supreme Court justices might rule. 

That disclaimer “seems like a tacit acknowledgment that his whole premise is faulty,” Villeneuve wrote in the NPI piece.

The response: Asked about the article, Nguyen called the feedback helpful and said he made a series of updates to address some of the issues raised by Villeneuve in the piece.

For example, he added a “note on the foundations” to the site’s case explainer, granting that Culliton rests on federal precedents the U.S. Supreme Court has since abandoned, and citing Spitzer’s own argument that a future court should weigh the question fresh. 

“Reasonable people will disagree on the project’s premise, and that’s fine,” he wrote to Villeneuve in an amicable exchange that he shared with GeekWire. 

The article describes Nguyen as right-wing, but he said he tries to stay “in the moderate lane.” 

He said he wanted the site “to be less political and more educational, applicable to any voter wishing to know more about the judicial candidates.” In fact, it could be used just as easily by people wanting to align their ballots with the likelihood of upholding the new tax.

How he built it: Nguyen, who is not a software developer, used agentic AI to research the public records and build the entire site from scratch, directing it to rely on sources he considered legitimate (including court opinions, official filings, and news coverage) rather than random blog or Reddit posts.

He also set up a vetting process to fact-check entries before publication.

Nguyen uses Perplexity Computer, an agentic tool that operates a computer on its own (browsing the web, using software and building files) and divides a job among multiple AI agents working in parallel. He’s on the $200 a month Perplexity Max plan.

A sophisticated website or app like this might have required a small team and thousands of dollars in the past. Nguyen built it over the course of a few hours, for about $100 in AI tokens. He says it has attracted “a few hundred thousand page views” since its launch this spring. 

“This is where agentic AI steps in and offers a whole roster of skills that I don’t have,” he said. “I would never be able to imagine that I could put something like this together.” 

Legal landscape: The Legislature passed the 9.9% tax and Gov. Bob Ferguson signed it in March 2026. It applies to income earned starting in 2028, with the first payments due in 2029.

Culliton2026.org’s assessment is that six of the nine current justices on the court lean toward upholding the tax, two toward striking it down, and one is too uncertain to call. 

Five of the court’s nine seats are on the ballot this year, four of them contested in Tuesday’s primary, with the top two in each race advancing to November. Three of the seats on the ballot are held by sitting justices seeking to stay on the court; the other two are open. 

A case filed in Klickitat County Superior Court in April, led by former state Attorney General Rob McKenna and former state Supreme Court Justice Phil Talmadge, argues the tax is an unconstitutional income tax and is expected to reach the state Supreme Court. The number of contested seats means the election could reshape the court before the case arrives. 

Voters will also weigh in directly in November. Initiative 645, backed by Let’s Go Washington — the group founded by hedge-fund manager Brian Heywood — would repeal the tax before it takes effect in 2028. It qualified for the ballot in July with more than 500,000 signatures.

Nguyen’s background: He arrived in Washington as a 17-month-old refugee from Vietnam in 1975, studied political science at the UW, and got his start in 1996 volunteering on Gary Locke’s campaign for governor, as he noted in the Seattle Times piece. 

He ran local races before spending nearly two decades at Microsoft, T-Mobile and 5G Americas, the wireless industry trade group that he led until it wound down this year.

Culliton2026.org is just one of the civic sites Nguyen has built the same way. His Washington Accountability Registry catalogs 87 state and local government cases it labels fraud, conflicts of interest or oversight failures, and, like the Culliton site, calls itself independent and nonpartisan. 

Others are more explicit in taking a side: a dashboard about the King County homelessness authority is headlined “One verdict: wind KCRHA down,” and an emergency-clause tracker titled “Locked Out” flags 19 bills the Legislature made “referendum-proof.” 

He has also dabbled in AI-generated music videos, including one about Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson with the hook, “Hey Katie, get it together, the city’s falling apart.” 

“All AI generated,” Nguyen said of his projects. “We live in a new world.”

Or, as Paine put it in Common Sense, “The birthday of a new world is at hand.”

Chainalysis Says Its On-Chain Analytics Cleared A Key Federal Evidence Test is a useful reminder that crypto coverage is not only about token prices. Sometimes the more important story is the infrastructure, regulation, security, or product layer sitting underneath the market noise.

The immediate point is straightforward: chainalysis explained how its software met the Daubert evidentiary standard. That gives readers something concrete to work with, rather than another vague sentiment update.

TL;DR

• Chainalysis explained how its software met the Daubert evidentiary standard.
• The issue centres on whether on-chain analytics can be admitted in federal court.
• The story matters for crypto investigations and legal evidence standards.

Why This Matters Now

The timing matters because Chainalysis is already part of a wider conversation across the market. Traders want to know whether the development changes liquidity or risk. Builders want to know whether it changes what can be deployed. Compliance teams want to know whether it changes how platforms operate.

In that sense, the story is bigger than one headline. It sits inside the ongoing shift from speculative crypto cycles toward more practical questions: who can use these systems, how safe are they, and whether the underlying incentives actually work.

The best way to read it is with discipline. It is not a guarantee of immediate upside, and it should not be treated as one. But it does add a fresh data point to the way the market is thinking about Chainalysis.

The Chainalysis Angle

For Chainalysis, the important part is the specific mechanism. If this is a security issue, the risk sits in dependencies and user protection. If it is a listing or product launch, the question is access and liquidity. If it is a governance or research proposal, the question is whether the idea can survive implementation.

That is where this update becomes useful. It is not just a label attached to a trend. It gives readers a way to understand what might actually change if the development gains traction.

Crypto has a habit of turning every announcement into a broad market claim. This one deserves a narrower read. The value is in seeing how it affects the users, developers, institutions, or traders closest to the issue.

The Risk Side

There is also a caution attached. Source material can confirm that a development exists, but it cannot prove that adoption will follow. A proposal still needs support. A product still needs users. A chart still needs confirmation. A compliance tool still needs integration.

That is why the responsible reading is not to oversell the story. The stronger takeaway is that this adds to a pattern. The crypto market is steadily becoming more professional, more technical, and more sensitive to real operational details.

Readers should also watch for follow-up signals. That could mean developer feedback, exchange support, regulatory response, wallet adoption, liquidity data, or simply whether market participants continue reacting after the first headline fades.

What Comes Next

The next stage will decide whether this remains a narrow update or becomes part of a larger market theme. In crypto, that difference matters. Plenty of stories look important for a few hours and then disappear. The ones that last usually show up again through usage, liquidity, enforcement, governance, or developer adoption.

For now, this gives the market another piece of information to weigh. It is specific enough to be useful, but still early enough that readers should keep the caveats in view.

That makes it worth covering without pretending it settles anything. The story is a signal, not a final verdict.

The key is not to confuse coverage with certainty. Chainalysis stories can move quickly, especially when they touch security, regulation, listings, infrastructure, or price levels. The useful approach is to track the next confirming detail rather than assume the first update carries the whole market story. That is how traders avoid chasing noise and how readers separate a genuine development from another passing headline.

This report is based on information from chainalysis.com.

This article was written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.