LawSites: I Use It to Analyze the Legality of President Trump’s Pause of Federal Grants – “Over the weekend, OpenAI released Deep Research, an AI agent capable of completing multi-step research tasks and synthesizing large amounts of online information. OpenAI’s chief product officer Kevin Weil said it can complete complex research tasks in minutes that might take a person many hours or days, according to The New York Times, adding that it should be particularly useful for people in fields such as finance, science and law. Curious to see what it can do, I have been running it through several research tasks today. In search of a meaty legal issue, I decided to ask it to research and analyze the legality of the Trump administration’s temporary pause of federal grant and financial assistance programs, and then to outline the potential legal remedies available to recipients of those grants and financial assistance. In 10 minutes, it produced the following memorandum, which consumes 9,000 words and 17 single-spaced pages in a Word document, and which covers in some detail:
- Legal authority for the pause.
- Potential legal challenges.
- Relevant case law and precedent on agency authority to suspend or cancel aid.
- Legal rights and remedies of affected funding recipients.
- Arguments for and against the legality of the pause.
- Conclusion.
For the record, the memorandum ultimately concludes that the pause on grants and assistance “appears to rest on shaky legal ground.” Note that it uses only publicly available sources, not paywalled legal research platforms. It typically cited FindLaw for cases and seemed to rely heavily on JD Supra for analysis. Query what it could have done with access to Westlaw or Lexis. I am no expert in this area of law, and so I cannot assess the overall quality of the legal analysis and conclusions. But I think any lawyer would agree that this has the potential to be an even-more powerful AI tool than anything we have seen so far. Read it for yourself (and let me know what you think)…”
