AI Assembled 030926

AI ASSEMBLED – EPISODE AIA030926 March 9, 2026   STORY 1: Supreme Court — AI Cannot Own Copyright (Mar 2) Denied cert in Thaler v. Perlmutter — AI-only output gets no copyright protection. Allen v. Perlmutter still pending in Colorado on AI-assisted works. SMB Takeaway: Your AI-generated content is not automatically copyrighted. Add meaningful human editing and document it.   STORY 2: OpenAI + Anthropic Recruit Big Consulting (Feb 23 / Mar 3) OpenAI's Frontier Alliances — McKinsey, BCG, Accenture, Capgemini. Anthropic has Deloitte (15K trained staff) + Accenture. 40% of McKinsey's work is now AI/analytics-related. SMB Takeaway: AI is 20% of the adoption problem. The other 80% is human change management — same at your scale as at McKinsey's.   STORY 3: Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite + GPT-5.4 — The Model Market Has Tiers (Mar 4 & 6) Flash Lite: economy tier, $0.25/$1.50 per million tokens. GPT-5.4: premium, 1M-token context, extreme reasoning mode. SMB Takeaway: Match model to workload — economy vs. premium is now a real cost decision.   STORY 4: LinkedIn Premium All-in-One for SMBs (March 2026) $99/month combining Sales Navigator, Recruiter Lite, and marketing tools with AI guidance and ad-boost credits. SMB Takeaway: Worth it if LinkedIn is an active B2B channel. Not worth it if it isn't.   STORY 5: Google Flow — AI Video Now Inside Workspace (March 2026) Whisk + ImageFX merged into Flow's unified workspace, now open to all Google Workspace subscribers. SMB Takeaway: If you're on Workspace, run one experiment this week — describe your last marketing campaign and see what Flow produces.   STORY 6: Alibaba Qwen 3.5 — Capable, Free, Runs on a Laptop (Mar 3) 0.8B–9B params, Apache 2.0, on Hugging Face. 9B beats OpenAI's open-source reference benchmark. No API fees. No data leaves your hardware. SMB Takeaway: Most accessible free local AI option released to date. Test for any privacy-sensitive or cost-constrained workflow.   STORY 7: AI Regulation — Oregon Passes, Federal Preemption Looms (Mar 6) Oregon SB 1546 (youth chatbot safeguards) passes legislature, heads to governor. Trump admin formally building list of state AI laws to preempt. SMB Takeaway: Know your state's AI requirements — especially if your tools interact with customers or young users.   CLOSING: The week's defining tension was access vs. accountability. Content is cheaper and more capable than ever — and less legally protected than most businesses assume. Consulting firms are being recruited, not replaced. The model market has tiers now, so use them.