Commercial Litigation Update

On March 4, 2026, Nippon Life Insurance Company of America (“Nippon Life”) filed suit against OpenAI Foundation and OpenAI Group PBC in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois—claiming that a covered employee’s zealous use of the artificial intelligence (“AI”) tool, ChatGPT, for pro se litigation caused the chatbot to engage in tortious interference with a contract, abuse of process, and the unlicensed practice of law.

A federal judge recently concluded that the defendant in a white-collar securities dispute may not claim that his conversations with the artificial intelligence (“AI”) tool, Claude, are privileged. Litigators and clients now must take heed.

Artificial intelligence is moving beyond standalone large language model wrappers toward collections of specialized AI agents that reason, act, and collaborate to achieve complex outcomes. This multi-agent vision, articulated in Google’s Introduction to Agents whitepaper,[1] marks a subtle, but seismic, shift in how businesses will deploy AI; and spotlights nuanced legal challenges that litigators and in-house counsel should start addressing now.

[1] https://www.kaggle.com/whitepaper-introduction-to-agents (last visited January 21, 2026).