Artificial intelligence (“AI”) is generating more than content; it is generating lawsuits. Here is a brief chronology of what I believe are some of the most significant lawsuits that have been filed so far.
Most of these allege copyright infringement, but some make additional or other kinds of claims, such as trademark, privacy or publicity right violations, defamation, unfair competition, and breach of contract, among others. So far, the suits primarily target the developers and purveyors of generative AI chatbots and similar technology. They focus more on what I call “input infringement” than on “output infringement.” That is to say, they allege that copyright infringement is involved in the way particular AI tools are trained.
Thomson Reuters Enterprise Centre GmbH et al. v. ROSS Intelligence, Inc.
Thomson Reuters Enterprise Centre GmbH et al. v. ROSS Intelligence Inc., No. 20-cv-613 (D. Del. 2020)
Thomson Reuters alleges that ROSS Intelligence copied its Westlaw database without permission and used it to train a competing AI-driven legal research platform. In defense, ROSS has asserted that it only copied ideas and facts from the Westlaw database of legal research materials. (Facts and ideas are not protected by copyright.) ROSS also argues that its use of content in the Westlaw database is fair use.
One difference between this case and subsequent generative-AI copyright infringement cases is that the defendant in this case is alleged to have induced a third party with a Westlaw license to obtain allegedly proprietary content for the defendant after the defendant had been denied a license of its own. Other cases involve generative AI technologies that operate by scraping publicly available content.
- Update: The court has now issued a fair use decision in Thomson Reuters v. ROSS Intelligence. After reviewing the headnotes and comparing them with the database materials, Judge Bilbas concluded that 2,243 headnotes were sufficiently creative and original to receive copyright protection, that Ross infringed them, and that “fair use” was not a defense in this instance because the purpose of the use was commercial and it competed in the same market. This decision might have limited value as a precedent, since it involved non-generative AI. Generative AI tools may be distinguishable in the fair use analysis. The district court approved Ross’s motion for interlocutory appeal. The case is under review by the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.
Doe 1 et al. v. GitHub, Inc. et al.
Doe 1 et al. v. GitHub, Inc. et al., No. 22-cv-06823 (N.D. Calif. November 3, 2022)
This is a class action lawsuit against GitHub, Microsoft, and OpenAI that was filed in November, 2022. It involves GitHub’s CoPilot, an AI-powered tool that suggests lines of programming code based on what a programmer has written. The complaint alleges that Copilot copies code from publicly available software repositories without complying with the terms of applicable open-source licenses. The complaint also alleges removal of copyright management information in violation of 17 U.S.C. § 1202, unfair competition, and other tort claims.
Updates: The court dismissed most of the plaintiffs’ claims, but allowed them to proceed with claims for breach of open-source licenses and granted leave to amend the DMCA claims in the complaint.
Plaintiffs filed an amended complaint. The court, however, dismissed the DMCA claim, reasoning that the statute imposes an “identicality” standard (i.e., the AI’s output must be an exact, literal copy of the plaintiff’s work). Because plaintiffs alleged that Copilot’s outputs often generate modified versions of their original code rather than strict identical copies, the court dismissed the claim.
Judge Tigar certified the question whether identicality is required for interlocutory appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals
Andersen et al. v. Stability AI et al.
Andersen et al. v. Stability AI et al., No. 23-cv-00201 (N.D. Calif. Jan. 13, 2023)
Update: Read my case update on Andresen v. Stability AI.
- Further Updates: As noted in my first update on Anderson v. Stability, Judge Orrick dismissed all claims except for Andersen’s direct infringement claim against Stability. Most of the dismissals, however, were granted with leave to amend.
Trial is scheduled for 2027.
Getty Images v. Stability AI
Plaintiffs filed an amended complaint, having secured proper copyright registrations for the underlying art. Defendants filed a motion to dismiss it. The court denied the motion. The ruling on the motion suggests that copied images scraped into the training datasets can constitute direct infringement, and that AI models may inherently constitute a continuous, new form of infringing materials. The court also allowed the artists’ claims regarding false endorsement and trade-dress infringement to proceed. These claims address AI tools mimicking an artist’s name and style.
Getty Images v. Stability AI, No. 23-cv-00135-UNA (D. Del. February 23, 2023)
Getty Images has filed two lawsuits against Stability AI, one in the United Kingdom and one in the United States, each alleging both input and output copyright infringement. Getty Images owns the rights to millions of images. It is in the business of licensing rights to use copies of the images to others. The lawsuit also accuses Stability AI of falsifying, removing or altering copyright management information, trademark infringement, trademark dilution, unfair competition, and deceptive trade practices.
Stability AI has moved to dismiss the complaint filed in the U.S. for lack of jurisdiction.
Updates: Getty voluntarily dismissed the Delaware case and refiled the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. Getty Images v. Stability AI, No. 3:25-cv-06891 (N.D. Calif. 2025).
In 2026, Judge Thompson dismissed the DMCA claim, but allowed claims for direct copyright infringement, trademark violation, and unfair competition to proceed.
Getty Images dropped the input-infringement copyright claim that it had filed in the U.K., primarily because it could not definitively prove where the model was trained (i.e., whether it was inside or outside the UK).
The UK court rejected Getty Images’s argument that the Stable Diffusion software itself was an “infringing copy” of an article imported into the UK. The court ruled that AI model weights are not copies; they are abstract statistical parameters that do not store or reproduce actual images.
Getty Images prevailed on trademark claims in the U.K., however.
Flora et al. v. Prisma Labs, Inc.
Flora et al. v. Prisma Labs, Inc., No. 23-cv-00680 (N.D. Calif. February 15, 2023)
Jack Flora and others filed a class action lawsuit against Prisma Labs for invasion of privacy. The complaint alleges, among other things, that the defendant’s Lensa app generates sexualized images from images of fully-clothed people, and that the company failed to notify users about the biometric data it collects and how it will be stored and/or destroyed, in violation of Illinois’s data privacy laws.
Update: The court granted a motion to compel arbitration.
Young v. NeoCortext, Inc.
Young v. NeoCortext, Inc., 2023-cv-02496 (C.D. Calif. April 3, 2023)
This is a publicity rights case. NeoCortext’s Reface app allows users to paste images of their own faces over those of celebrities in photographs and videos. Kyland Young, a former cast member of the Big Brother reality television show, has sued NeoCortext for allegedly violating his publicity rights. The complaint alleges that NeoCortext has “commercially exploit[ed] his and thousands of other actors, musicians, athletes, celebrities, and other well-known individuals’ names, voices, photographs, or likenesses to sell paid subscriptions to its smartphone application, Reface, without their permission.”
NeoCortext has asserted a First Amendment defense, among others.
Update: U.S. District Judge Wesley L. Hsu denied NeoCortext’s motion to dismiss. Judge Hsu ruled that Young’s right of publicity claim was not preempted by the Copyright Act because he was seeking to vindicate the misuse of his personal likeness, not just the distribution of copyrighted images. The app’s face-swapping capabilities did not qualify as a “transformative use” defense as a matter of law at the dismissal stage.
Walters v. OpenAI, LLC
Walters v. OpenAI, LLC, No. 2023-cv-03122 (N.D. Ga. July 14, 2023) (Complaint originally filed in Gwinnett County, Georgia Superior Court on June 5, 2023; subsequently removed to federal court)
This is a defamation action against OpenAI, the company responsible for ChatGPT. The lawsuit was brought by Mark Walters. He alleges that ChatGPT provided false and defamatory misinformation about him to journalist Fred Riehl in connection with a federal civil rights lawsuit against Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson and members of his staff. ChatGPT allegedly stated that the lawsuit was one for fraud and embezzlement on the part of Mr. Walters. The complaint alleges that Mr. Walters was “neither a plaintiff nor a defendant in the lawsuit,” and “every statement of fact” pertaining to him in the summary of the federal lawsuit that ChatGPT prepared is false. A New York court recently addressed the questions of sanctions for attorneys who submit briefs containing citations to non-existent “precedents” that were entirely made up by ChatGPT. This is the first case to address tort liability for ChatGPT’s notorious creation of “hallucinatory facts.”
In July, 2023, Jeffery Battle filed a complaint against Microsoft in Maryland alleging that he, too, has been defamed as a result of AI-generated “hallucinatory facts.” Battle v. Microsoft.
Update on Walters v. OpenAI, LLC: In 2025, the court granted summary judgment in favor of OpenAI, on three grounds:
- No Factual Statement: The court ruled that a reasonable reader would not interpret the ChatGPT output as stating actual facts. This was heavily influenced by the AI’s internal disclaimers, its warning to the user that it lacked access to the referenced document, and the user’s own admission that he quickly verified the claim was false.
- No Fault or Malice: To win a defamation claim as a public figure, Walters needed to prove OpenAI acted with negligent disregard for truth or “actual malice.” The court found he failed to provide evidence of either. OpenAI successfully argued that it leads the AI industry in reducing such “hallucinations” through training and human feedback.
- Lack of Damages: The court noted Walters did not suffer provable damages or ask OpenAI for a retraction before filing, making him ineligible to recover the punitive or presumed damages he sought.
P.M. et al. v. OpenAI LP et al.
P.M. et al. v. OpenAI LP et al., No. 2023-cv-03199 (N.D. Calif. June 28, 2023)
This lawsuit has been brought by underage individuals against OpenAI and Microsoft. The complaint alleges the defendants’ generative-AI products ChatGPT, Dall-E and Vall-E collect private and personally identifiable information from children without their knowledge or informed consent. The complaint sets out claims for alleged violations of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act; the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act; California’s Invasion of Privacy Act and unfair competition law; Illinois’s Biometric Information Privacy Act, Consumer Fraud and Deceptive Business Practices Act, and Consumer Fraud and Deceptive Business Practices Act; New York General Business Law § 349 (deceptive trade practices); and negligence, invasion of privacy, conversion, unjust enrichment, and breach of duty to warn.
Update: Plaintiffs filed a voluntary dismissal.
Tremblay v. OpenAI, Inc.
Tremblay v. OpenAI, Inc., No. 23-cv-03223 (N.D. Calif. June 28, 2023)
Another copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI relating to its ChatGPT tool. In this one, authors allege that ChatGPT is trained on the text of books they and other proposed class members authored, and facilitates output copyright infringement. The complaint sets forth claims of copyright infringement, DMCA violations, and unfair competition.
Updates: The court dismissed claims of vicarious copyright infringement, Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) violations, negligence, and unjust enrichment. Claims for direct copyright infringement of the input kind, and unfair trade practices, survived.
The Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation centralized dozens of AI copyright lawsuits against OpenAI into a single venue: U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York under Judge Sidney H. Stein. In Re OpenAI, Inc. Copyright Infringement Litigation. Tremblay is included in this consolidation. .
Silverman et al. v. OpenAI
Silverman et al. v. OpenAI, No. 23-cv-03416 (N.D. Calif. July 7, 2023)
Sarah Silverman (comedian/actress/writer) and others allege that OpenAI, by using copyright-protected works without permission to train ChatGPT, committed direct and vicarious copyright infringement, violated section 17 U.S.C. 1202(b), and their rights under unfair competition, negligence, and unjust enrichment law.
Updates: In February 2024, U.S. District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín issued a joint ruling covering both the Tremblay and Silverman motions to dismiss. The court dismissed claims of vicarious copyright infringement, negligence, and unjust enrichment, but allowed the input infringement claim to proceed. OpenAI did not contest that using the plaintiffs’ books to train its Large Language Models (LLMs) required a “fair use” determination
On June 25, 2025 Judge Chhabria issued a ruling on fair use. The court granted Meta’s motion for summary judgment on fair use with respect to AI training; reserved the motion for summary judgment on the DMCA claims for decision in a separate order, and held that the claim of infringing distribution via leeching or seeding “will remain a live issue in the case.”
The case has been consolidated into the broader Multidistrict Litigation (MDL) pending in the Southern District of New York.
Kadrey et al. v. Meta Platforms
Kadrey et al. v. Meta Platforms, No. 2023-cv-03417 (N.D. Calif. July 7, 2023)
The same kinds of allegations as are made in Silverman v. OpenAI, but this time against Meta Platforms, Inc.
Update: There has been a ruling in Kadrey v. Meta Platforms.J.L. et al. v. Alphabet Inc. et al.
J.L. et al. v. Alphabet Inc. et al. (N.D. Calif. July 11, 2023)
This is a lawsuit against Google and its owner Alphabet, Inc. for allegedly scraping and harvesting private and personal user information, copyright-protected works, and emails, without notice or consent. The complaint alleges claims for invasion of privacy, unfair competition, negligence, copyright infringement, and other causes of action.
Update: Plaintiffs voluntarily dismissed defendants Alphabet Inc. and Google DeepMind. Google LLC remains the sole defendant, and the litigation—now tracked as In re Google Generative AI Copyright Litigation—is proceeding.
On the regulatory front
The U.S. Copyright Office is examining the problems associated with registering copyrights in works that rely, in whole or in part, on artificial intelligence. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has suggested that generative-AI implicates “competition concerns.”. Lawmakers in the United States and the European Union are considering legislation to regulate AI in various ways.
Update on Copyright Office Reports: The Copyright Office has issued reports in three parts:
Part 1: Digital Replicas
Released on July 31, 2024, this initial part addresses the unauthorized use of AI to realistically replicate an individual’s voice or appearance (e.g., deepfakes and AI-generated music tracks mimicking famous artists). The Copyright Office recommends that Congress enact a new federal law to protect individuals from unauthorized digital replica distributions. See Copyright and Artificial Intelligence Part 1 -Digital Replicas.
Part 2: Copyrightability
This Report addresses whether and to what extent AI-generated output is protected by copyright. Key findings and conclusions:
- Prompts are Insufficient: Text prompts generally function merely as instructions to convey unprotectable ideas. Because a user does not exercise ultimate creative control over how the AI generates the final material, prompts alone do not establish human authorship.
- AI as a Creative Tool: If a human author maintains sufficient control over the expressive elements, the work can be protected. For example, if a creator inputs their own hand-drawn art and uses AI to refine it, the original perceptible human work remains copyrightable.
- Modifications and Arrangements: Humans can claim copyright over the creative selection, coordination, arrangement, or expressive modification of AI-generated content. However, protection only applies to the human-contributed elements, not the AI-generated parts. The Copyright Office mandates transparency. Authors submitting registration applications have a duty to disclose and disclaim any AI-generated content within their applications that is more than minor (de minimis)
- No New Laws Needed: The Office concluded that existing legal frameworks are flexible enough to evaluate AI cases on a case-by-case basis without need for new legislation.
See Copyright and Artificial Intelligence Part 2 – Copyrightability.
Part 3. Generative-AI Training
This report deals with copyright issues associated with the use of copyrighted works in generative-AI training, especially input infringement.
- Fair Use Limitations: Using commercial troves of copyrighted works to build models that directly compete with original authors likely stretches past fair use boundaries.
- The Role of Licensing: The Office highlighted that voluntary licensing markets are already actively emerging across the music and news sectors.
See Copyright and Artificial Intelligence Part 3 – Generative AI Training.
For more updates, see my full AI Lawsuits Roundup.”
For a wealth of information about copyright law, visit my extensive Copyright FAQs page.
