US seeks to join Musk’s challenge to €120m EU fine against X

2 min read•Sep 27, 2026•

The US Department of Justice is seeking to join Elon Musk and X’s challenge to overturn the EU’s €120m fine, first reported by Bbc. The dispute centers on X’s paid blue check marks, which the European Commission said deceived users by failing to meaningfully verify who was behind an account.

The DOJ filed an application with the EU’s General Court backing Musk’s and X’s effort to dismiss the case. It argues that a provision in the court’s statute allows a state to intervene if it can establish an interest in the outcome.

The department says the US has a clear interest in ensuring any Commission decision is applied consistently with how territorial jurisdiction is generally understood in international law. It also wants to ensure the case would not otherwise prejudice US-headquartered digital services that contribute significantly to the US economy.

On Thursday, Assistant Attorney General Brett A. Shumate said the Commission had “inappropriately attempted” to extend its reach to American companies outside its control.

European Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier said Friday the bloc was ready to defend its position, arguing it had a strong case because of the alleged Digital Services Act breach. The action marked the Commission’s first official non-compliance decision under the DSA, one of two mandatory rulebooks governing online platforms in the EU.

EU regulators also accused X of failing to provide transparency around its adverts and denying researchers access to public data.

Marco Rubio and the Federal Communications Commission had criticized the regulator, accusing it of attacking and censoring US firms. The Commission denied targeting any specific nationality and said it was protecting its digital and democratic standards.

The legal fight now joins a challenge to X’s paid verification labels with the US government’s stated objection to EU authority over American companies. The EU is also conducting several other investigations into X, including one over concerns its integrated AI assistant Grok was used to create sexualised images of real people.

Oct 7, 2026

Arizona appeals court vacates manslaughter sentence after AI video

An Arizona appeals court vacated the 10.5-year sentence of Gabriel Horcasitas while upholding his manslaughter conviction, first reported by Nytimes. The case returns to Maricopa County Superior Court for resentencing without the video, after judges found that it presented scripted statements as if the victim himself were speaking in court.

The three-judge panel said the video generated a likeness of Christopher Pelkey’s voice and appearance but did not reflect actual events. It found that allowing and relying on the video made the sentencing fundamentally unfair, and noted that no prior Arizona case had addressed the admissibility of such a depiction at sentencing.

The judges said a victim’s right to speak cannot override a defendant’s right to be sentenced on accurate, reliable information. They said the video collapsed the distinction between the family’s belief about what Pelkey would have said and Pelkey’s own voice and opinions.

The ruling distinguishes family members speaking about Pelkey from a generated likeness that appeared to speak for him.

Pelkey’s sister, Stacey Wales, presented the video during Horcasitas’s sentencing alongside victim-impact statements from family and friends. Wales wrote the script and said her husband and the couple’s longtime business partner helped create the video using Pelkey’s voice from a YouTube video and his face and torso from a funeral-service poster.

Judge Todd F. Lang praised the video as genuine, then imposed the maximum sentence of 10.5 years, more than the nine years prosecutors had sought.

Wales said nobody intended to make the court believe Pelkey was alive or that he had recorded the video before his death. She said she disagreed with the ruling and argued that families use slide shows, collages, hypothetical conversations and poetry to convey grief.

Wales compared the AI video with photography, saying it took 15 years of landmark cases around the 1860s before photography was widely accepted in courts.

The case returns to Maricopa County Superior Court for a new sentencing hearing without the AI-generated video.