New York's attorney general sued Valve, a video game developer whose franchises include Counter-Strike, Team Fortress and Dota, accusing it of promoting illegal gambling and threatening to addict children through its use of "loot boxes." In a complaint filed on Feb. 25 in a state court in Manhattan, Attorney General Letitia James said Valve's loot boxes amounted to "quintessential gambling," violating the state's constitution and penal law, with valuable items often hard to win and many items worth pennies. Valve, based in Bellevue, Washington, did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Loot boxes let players use real money to buy chances to win virtual items, such as decorations for characters and weapons, in an effort to convey status. James said Valve generated billions of dollars of revenue by selling "keys" to open loot boxes, including in one game where the process resembled a slot machine as a wheel whirred through various items before stopping. The attorney general said key sales advanced Valve's unusual business model of letting players sell items they won on its virtual marketplace, Steam Community Market, and on other marketplaces. "Valve’s loot boxes are particularly pernicious because they are popular among children and adolescents," according to the complaint. Children introduced to gambling by age 12 are four times more likely to become problem gamblers as adults, the complaint added, citing the Massachusetts Department of Public Health. James is seeking restitution for players, plus a fine of three times Valve's alleged illegal gains. Loot boxes for video games have been the subject of other regulatory action. For example, in January 2025, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission fined Singapore-based Cognosphere, the maker of Genshin Impact, $20 million for deceiving children and others about the odds of winning valuable loot-box prizes. Children under 16 were also blocked from buying loot boxes without parental consent. Cognosphere, doing business as HoYoverse, did not admit wrongdoing, the FTC said.

A federal judge in California on Feb. 24 dismissed a lawsuit from Elon Musk's artificial intelligence startup xAI that accused rival Sam Altman's OpenAI of stealing its trade secrets. U.S. District Judge Rita Lin in San Francisco said that xAI could refile its case, but for now has failed to allege that OpenAI committed any misconduct. The lawsuit, filed in September, claimed that former xAI employees took source code related to its Grok chatbot and other confidential information with them when they left for new jobs at OpenAI. "Notably absent are allegations about the conduct of OpenAI itself," Lin said. "xAI does not allege any facts indicating that OpenAI induced xAI’s former employees to steal xAI’s trade secrets or that these former xAI employees used any stolen trade secrets once employed by OpenAI." Lin had signaled in a January opinion that she would likely rule for OpenAI. She gave xAI until March 17 to file an amended complaint. xAI has separately sued a former engineer, Xuechen Li, for allegedly taking trade secrets to the ChatGPT maker. Li was blocked in that case from sharing xAI's technology with OpenAI, though OpenAI has said that Li never worked for the company and that it never acquired or used any of xAI's secrets. Spokespeople and attorneys for xAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the Feb. 24 decision. "We welcome the court's decision," OpenAI said in a statement. "This baseless lawsuit was never anything more than yet another front in Mr. Musk's ongoing campaign of harassment." The lawsuit is part of a broader legal battle between Musk and Microsoft-backed OpenAI, which he co-founded and is also suing over its ?conversion to a for-profit company. Musk, the world's richest person, is seeking as much as $134.5 billion in damages from OpenAI and Microsoft in that case. Jury selection is scheduled for April 27. OpenAI said in a court filing that the trade-secrets case was part of a "campaign to harass a competitor with unfounded legal claims" because Grok could not keep up with ChatGPT.

A U.S. judge permanently barred the Justice Department on Feb. 23 from releasing a prosecutor's report on the criminal case accusing President Donald Trump of unlawfully retaining classified documents following his first term in office. Florida-based U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon found that releasing the report would be a "manifest injustice" to the Republican president and two former associates who were charged alongside him because it would detail substantial allegations of criminal wrongdoing in a case that never reached a jury. Cannon, who Trump appointed to the bench in 2020, dismissed all the charges in 2024. Trump was accused in the case pursued by Special Counsel Jack Smith of illegally storing documents related to U.S. national defense, including the American nuclear program, at his Mar-a-Lago social club and obstructing U.S. government efforts to retrieve the material. Cannon found that Smith had not been lawfully appointed by the Justice Department during Democratic former President Joe Biden's administration. Disclosure of Smith's report "would contravene basic notions of fairness and justice in the process, where no adjudication of guilt has been reached following initiation of criminal charges," Cannon wrote in the Feb. 23 ruling. The order means substantial information about one of the four criminal cases Trump faced in his years out of office may not be disclosed to the public. Trump attorney Kendra Wharton welcomed Cannon's order in a statement, adding that "any and all fruit of Smith's poisonous tree" should "never see the light of day." Trump and his two co-defendants, personal aide Walt Nauta and Mar-a-Lago manager Carlos de Oliveira, pleaded not guilty to all charges and argued that the case was a politically motivated abuse of the U.S. legal system. They urged Cannon to bar the release of the report, which details Smith's justification for seeking charges. The Justice Department under Trump supported those arguments, arguing the report was a confidential document. "Judge Cannon's ruling continues a troubling pattern of decisions that shield the president from public scrutiny and place secrecy above the public's right to know," said Chioma Chukwu, executive director of American Oversight, a government accountability group that has sought disclosure of the report. The Justice Department under Biden dropped an attempt to revive the case against Trump after he won the 2024 election. Special counsels, who are appointed to lead certain politically sensitive investigations, are required to draft reports to the U.S. attorney general detailing their conclusions on whether to seek charges. Shortly before Trump returned to the presidency 13 months ago, the Justice Department released Smith's report detailing his other since-dismissed case against Trump, which accused Trump of plotting to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election. Cannon initially had barred disclosure of the documents case report to Congress, citing the ongoing case against Nauta and de Oliveira. The Justice Department dropped charges against Nauta and de Oliveira after Trump returned to office last year. In the ruling, Cannon also cited concerns about releasing confidential grand jury information and concluded that Smith's drafting of the report circumvented her order finding him unlawfully appointed.