Vulcan Technologies

Vulcan Technologies Frontier AI for government and law

Five federal agencies still have active rules about protecting typewriter ribbons.The Federal Energy Regulatory Commissi...
08/25/2026

Five federal agencies still have active rules about protecting typewriter ribbons.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission says an insecure ribbon can’t be left in the machine overnight. The White House Office of Management and Budget says ribbons should be removed after each use. Other federal rules still explain how classified ribbons should be stored or destroyed.

And the logic actually made sense. A used ribbon can preserve a readable imprint of everything typed through it, so in the typewriter era, leaving one behind could mean leaving a copy of classified work sitting on the desk.

The machine disappeared. The security instructions stayed.

Here’s the best part: the Commodity Futures Trading Commission amended one of these rules in 2024, and the language covering “carbon paper, typewriter ribbons, recording discs, spools and tapes” survived.

That’s how old law hangs around. A section gets opened to solve one problem, while language written for another technological era can keep operating beside the new text.

With Justinian, can see the rule as it exists today, how it got there, which pieces survived decades of amendments, and how it fits into current law.

There is apparently no janitor for the Code of Federal Regulations.

Three months from now, GTA VI comes out. Millions of people will hit a button on the PlayStation Store that says **BUY**...
08/20/2026

Three months from now, GTA VI comes out. Millions of people will hit a button on the PlayStation Store that says **BUY**.

Sony’s own terms are very specific about what that word means.

Section 10.1 says words including “own,” “ownership,” “purchase,” “sale,” “sold,” “sell,” “rent” and “buy” do not mean ownership of the content has been transferred to you.

Section 8.4 goes even further: when you order from the PlayStation Store, “you buy a personal license to use that product.”

And Section 10.2 contains the word worth paying attention to: **revocable.**

PlayStation content is licensed on a “non-exclusive and revocable basis.”

That gets especially interesting as physical media disappears. Rockstar has said the physical edition of GTA VI will contain a download code inside the box. No disc. The box ultimately points you back to the digital license.

States have started paying attention to the gap between what the checkout button says and what the agreement actually gives you.

California’s AB 2426 restricts sellers from using words like “buy” or “purchase” for digital goods unless they disclose that the transaction is a license. Maryland followed, and similar proposals have appeared elsewhere.

This is exactly the kind of fine-print question Justinian can dig through across contracts, statutes and jurisdictions to see what those terms actually mean once the law around them is taken into account.

Read the terms. Then read the law around them.

Or let Justinian handle both.

Congress passed a law describing an owl’s outfit.16 U.S.C. § 580p still defines Woodsy Owl as “a fanciful owl, who wears...
08/18/2026

Congress passed a law describing an owl’s outfit.

16 U.S.C. § 580p still defines Woodsy Owl as “a fanciful owl, who wears slacks (forest green when colored), a belt (brown when colored), and a Robin Hood style hat (forest green when colored) with a feather (red when colored).”

Congress legislated the pants. The belt. The hat. And it wrote the colors as conditional because somebody in 1974 thought ahead to the black-and-white version.

It goes further than the definition. Unauthorized use of Woodsy Owl “may be enjoined... at the suit of the Attorney General.” Active Forest Service regulations also run a licensing regime on top of it, including a requirement that the Chief of the Forest Service find you “well qualified to further the goals and purposes of the Woodsy Owl campaign.”

Fifty-two years later, all of it is still current law.

That last part is where the research gets interesting. Finding an old, ridiculous statute is easy. Knowing whether it still binds means following it into the regulations built around it, checking what remains active, and making sure nothing later changed the answer.

That’s what Justinian did here.

This is somehow still a law.

You pay for access to the legal database. That doesn’t mean your AI agent gets access too.LexisNexis’s terms restrict th...
08/12/2026

You pay for access to the legal database. That doesn’t mean your AI agent gets access too.

LexisNexis’s terms restrict third-party autonomous agents from logging in, navigating or querying the service without prior written permission.

And the restriction can reach human workflows too.

Lexis says use may become “systematic” when its service is functioning mainly as the data source for another system, even if a person is manually moving the information. So simply putting a human in the loop doesn’t necessarily solve the problem.

That creates a deeper issue for legal AI built on someone else’s database. If you can’t freely use that database as the data layer behind your system, the database owner can constrain how the product is built and how far its research workflows can go.

That’s why control of the corpus matters.

Vulcan built Justinian around a legal corpus it controls, allowing it to follow authority, move across sources and keep researching without another platform setting the limits.

For 91 years, Humphrey’s Executor stood between the president and the independent agencies.The 1935 decision limited the...
07/23/2026

For 91 years, Humphrey’s Executor stood between the president and the independent agencies.

The 1935 decision limited the president’s ability to fire leaders of the FTC, FCC, SEC, and other independent agencies at will. It was cited 805 times and treated as bedrock law.

Then, on June 29, 2026, the Supreme Court tore it down.

In Trump v. Slaughter, a 6–3 majority overruled Humphrey’s Executor and held that the president can remove FTC commissioners without cause.

That creates a serious problem for anyone using general AI for legal answers.

Ask whether a president can fire an FTC commissioner and a model may still tell you no. It can cite Humphrey’s Executor with complete confidence because it learned from decades of legal text treating the case as settled law.

The answer sounds authoritative. The law changed 5 weeks ago.

Vulcan Technologies reads the live legal record and tracks how every case, citation, and authority connects. When a precedent falls, Vulcan sees the decision that killed it and the exact date the old rule stopped being good law.

n Wisconsin, serving fake butter can cost you a year in jail.Wis. Stat. § 97.18 says a restaurant cannot serve colored m...
07/20/2026

n Wisconsin, serving fake butter can cost you a year in jail.

Wis. Stat. § 97.18 says a restaurant cannot serve colored margarine as a butter substitute unless the customer asks for it. And a repeat violation can mean up to 1 year in county jail.

America’s dairy state put real criminal penalties behind butter protection, and the statute is still active.

Vulcan Technologies is built to search across that entire legal corpus, identify the law that actually applies, trace its history and connections, and return the source document behind the answer.

Because legal research only works when the system can find all of the law, including the part nobody expected to matter.

You didn't just join a dating app. You joined a data empire, and deleting your profile won't necessarily make it forget ...
07/16/2026

You didn't just join a dating app. You joined a data empire, and deleting your profile won't necessarily make it forget you.

Start with who is on the other side of the screen. Tinder, Hinge, OkCupid, Match, and Plenty of Fish may look like competitors, but they are all owned by Match Group. Someone who “tries a few different apps” may spend the entire time inside the same corporate ecosystem, repeatedly handing one company their face, location, messages, preferences, and private conversations.

The terms help explain what happens next. While your account is active, the company receives a broad, royalty-free, worldwide license to the content you upload. Information may also be shared across affiliated services and companies, so data entered into one app does not necessarily remain confined to that app.

Match Group’s history makes those terms worth reading carefully. The Federal Trade Commission sued the company, alleging that it used deceptive romantic messages to push users toward paid subscriptions and made cancellation unnecessarily difficult. Those were allegations about how the company converted trust and personal attention into revenue.

Deleting your account does not automatically erase the underlying data either. Your profile may disappear from public view while certain information remains in company systems.

So the relationship can continue after you swipe it away. You left. Your data may have stayed inside the same corporate ecosystem that collected it across multiple apps.

There was almost a rule that capped your bank's overdraft fee at 5 dollars. It never took effect. Here is what killed it...
07/15/2026

There was almost a rule that capped your bank's overdraft fee at 5 dollars. It never took effect. Here is what killed it.

In late 2024, the CFPB finalized a rule covering banks and credit unions with more than $10 billion in assets. Beginning in October 2025, they would have had three choices: charge a $5 benchmark fee, charge only enough to cover their costs and losses, or treat overdraft services like credit and comply with federal lending disclosures and protections.

The banking industry sued to block the rule. But before the court fight could decide its fate, Congress used the Congressional Review Act.

The Senate voted 52-48 to repeal it. The House followed 217-211, and the resolution was signed into law on May.

A CRA repeal does more than delay a regulation. The rule loses legal effect, and the agency generally cannot issue another one that is “substantially the same” without new authorization from Congress.

The result is that the federal $5 benchmark never arrived. Banks remain subject to existing law and their own fee policies, which vary widely. Some still charge substantial overdraft fees, while others have reduced or eliminated them.

This is why tracking regulations requires more than reading the final rule. You have to follow the litigation, congressional action, presidential signature, effective date, and the law left standing afterward.

Vulcan Technologies tracks the entire lifecycle, including the rules that pass, the rules that never take effect, and the legal fights that decide which one actually governs.

A lawsuit says Meta used AI to help decide who got laid off. Read the complaint and you quickly see why one termination ...
07/14/2026

A lawsuit says Meta used AI to help decide who got laid off. Read the complaint and you quickly see why one termination decision can pull in nearly every branch of employment law at once.

Twenty-six current and former Meta employees sued the company in California federal court. They allege that, as Meta cut roughly 10 percent of its workforce, internal AI systems helped score and rank employees in a way that disadvantaged people who had taken protected medical or family leave.

The mechanism they describe is the important part. The systems allegedly relied on productivity and output metrics. Employees who had been away on leave had fewer metrics to show, so the complaint says they were ranked lower because of the absence the law was supposed to protect.

These are allegations. Meta denies them and says people, not machines, made the decisions. Nothing has been proven.

But the legal surface area is already enormous. The same layoff process now touches the Family and Medical Leave Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, state leave laws, workplace surveillance, arbitration agreements, algorithmic bias, and a request for emergency relief to pause the terminations.

One employment decision. Multiple bodies of law moving at once.

Most legal tools can explain one statute in isolation. Vulcan Technologies is built to map the entire system around the decision: the allegations, the governing laws, the state overlays, the contracts, the procedural posture, and the source documents connecting them.

That is the legal graph companies need to understand before AI starts making decisions about people’s jobs.

07/14/2026

On July 3, Vulcan Technologies hosted the Patriot Games Hackathon, inviting Austin's best and brightest to celebrate 250 years of America by building in response to the following prompt: "use AI to strengthen our Republic."

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