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📝 Page Status: Draft — sourced but not yet reviewed

  • Status: draft
  • Sources: 14
  • Relationships: 16
  • Research debt items: 5

AI Litigation Landscape

Summary

Generative AI is now a regular subject of civil litigation. The cases documented here fall into four clusters: (1) copyright in training data and model outputs, including news, books, and music, (2) copyright and trademark claims over AI-generated viral characters, (3) product-liability and speech defenses when chatbot products are alleged to have harmed users, and (4) one comparative German first-instance lyric judgment. This page is an inventory, not a prediction of outcomes.

Verified Facts

  • Thaler v. Perlmutter (D.C. Cir. Mar. 18, 2025) held that the Copyright Act requires human authorship and affirmed refusal to register a work attributed solely to a generative-AI system.1
  • The Copyright Office’s January 2025 copyrightability report concluded that purely AI-generated material is not copyrightable and that prompts alone do not provide sufficient human control on current generally available technology.2
  • Thomson Reuters v. Ross Intelligence (D. Del. Feb. 11, 2025) rejected fair use for a non-generative legal-research AI trained on Westlaw headnotes to compete with Westlaw.3
  • Bartz v. Anthropic PBC (N.D. Cal. June 23, 2025) held that training Claude on books was transformative fair use but that a pirated permanent library was not; a $1.5 billion class settlement of piracy claims was finally approved July 20, 2026.45
  • Kadrey v. Meta Platforms, Inc. (N.D. Cal. June 25, 2025) granted Meta fair-use summary judgment on Llama training as to thirteen authors on that record, while leaving torrenting-distribution claims for later proceedings.6
  • The New York Times Company v. Microsoft Corp. (S.D.N.Y.) survived most of an April 4, 2025 motion to dismiss; an August 6, 2026 order dismissed material-contribution contributory claims premised on alleged end-user infringement.78
  • Spyder Games LLC v. Mementum Lab (N.D. Cal., filed Nov. 26, 2025) seeks a declaration that AI-generated “brainrot” characters used in Steal a Brainrot are not copyrightable. See Brain Rot and AI-Generated Meme Characters.9
  • Garcia v. Character Technologies, Inc. (M.D. Fla. May 20, 2025) allowed most wrongful-death and product-liability claims against a chatbot company and Google to proceed and declined, at the pleading stage, to treat LLM output as protected speech.10
  • Music copyright dockets are inventoried in Music Copyright and Generative AI: UMG v. Suno and UMG v. Udio (sound recordings; partial dismissals; no U.S. fair-use holding), Concord v. Anthropic (lyrics; secondary and DMCA claims survive dismissal), and GEMA v. OpenAI (non-final German first-instance lyric judgment).11121314

Case map

Cluster Leading OIR page What is actually decided (as of sources cited)
Output authorship Thaler Machine listed as sole author cannot register.
Training vs piracy Bartz Training fair use; pirated library not; piracy claims settled.
Training market harm Kadrey Fair use on this record; dilution theory undeveloped.
Competing research AI Ross Not fair use; tool was not generative.
News outputs Times v. OpenAI Claims largely survive dismissal; some secondary theories dismissed.
Meme-character ownership Spyder Pending declaration action.
Music masters Suno / Udio Pending; partial dismissals; no U.S. fair-use holding.
Music lyrics (U.S.) Concord Secondary and CMI claims survive 12(b)(6).
Music lyrics (DE) GEMA First-instance liability; not final.
Chatbot harm Garcia Design-defect claims proceed; speech defense not established at 12(b)(6).

These dockets are not one “AI law.” Copyright training cases apply § 107 to copying that happens before a user sees an answer. Authorship cases ask who, if anyone, owns the answer or the image. Product-liability cases ask whether the software is a product whose design can be defective, which collides with First Amendment arguments that outputs are speech.10

For open-internet and software-freedom work, two tensions matter. First, a broad training-is-always-infringement rule would raise the cost of building models, including open-weight models; Bartz and Kadrey show district judges already disagree about how to weigh that against market harm.46 Second, treating chatbot text as unprotected non-speech at the pleading stage, as in Garcia, could expand design-defect litigation against conversational software without a merits record on causation.10

Criminal and sanctions cases involving software authors remain on Documented Proceedings Involving Software Authors and Operators; they are a different inventory.

Relationships

  • TOPIC-AI-LITIGATION related_to TOPIC-AI-COPYRIGHT.
  • TOPIC-AI-LITIGATION related_to TOPIC-BRAIN-ROT.
  • TOPIC-AI-LITIGATION related_to CASE-THALER-V-PERLMUTTER.
  • TOPIC-AI-LITIGATION related_to CASE-BARTZ-V-ANTHROPIC.
  • TOPIC-AI-LITIGATION related_to CASE-KADREY-V-META.
  • TOPIC-AI-LITIGATION related_to CASE-THOMSON-REUTERS-V-ROSS.
  • TOPIC-AI-LITIGATION related_to CASE-NYT-V-OPENAI.
  • TOPIC-AI-LITIGATION related_to CASE-SPYDER-V-MEMENTUM.
  • TOPIC-AI-LITIGATION related_to CASE-GARCIA-V-CHARACTER-TECHNOLOGIES.
  • TOPIC-AI-LITIGATION related_to TOPIC-AI-MUSIC-COPYRIGHT.
  • TOPIC-AI-LITIGATION related_to CASE-UMG-V-SUNO.
  • TOPIC-AI-LITIGATION related_to CASE-UMG-V-UDIO.
  • TOPIC-AI-LITIGATION related_to CASE-CONCORD-V-ANTHROPIC.
  • TOPIC-AI-LITIGATION related_to CASE-GEMA-V-OPENAI.
  • TOPIC-AI-LITIGATION related_to TOPIC-FIRST-AMENDMENT.
  • TOPIC-AI-LITIGATION related_to TOPIC-DEVELOPER-SOFTWARE-LIABILITY.

Sources

  1. SRC-THALER-V-PERLMUTTER-CADC: Thaler v. Perlmutter, 130 F.4th 1039 (D.C. Cir. 2025).
  2. SRC-USCO-AI-COPYRIGHTABILITY-REPORT-2025: Copyright Office AI copyrightability report, Part 2 (2025).
  3. SRC-THOMSON-REUTERS-V-ROSS-2025: Thomson Reuters v. Ross Intelligence (D. Del. 2025).
  4. SRC-BARTZ-V-ANTHROPIC-FAIR-USE: Bartz fair-use order (2025).
  5. SRC-BARTZ-V-ANTHROPIC-FINAL-APPROVAL: Bartz settlement final approval (2026).
  6. SRC-KADREY-V-META-FAIR-USE: Kadrey v. Meta (2025).
  7. SRC-NYT-V-OPENAI-MTD-2025: Times MTD opinion (2025).
  8. SRC-NYT-V-OPENAI-12C-2026: Times Rule 12(c) order (2026).
  9. SRC-SPYDER-V-MEMENTUM-COMPLAINT: Spyder complaint (2025).
  10. SRC-GARCIA-V-CHARACTER-MTD-2025: Garcia MTD order (2025).
  11. SRC-UMG-V-SUNO-COMPLAINT: UMG v. Suno complaint (2024).
  12. SRC-UMG-V-UDIO-COMPLAINT: UMG v. Udio complaint (2024).
  13. SRC-CONCORD-V-ANTHROPIC-MTD-2025: Concord MTD denial (2025).
  14. SRC-GEMA-V-OPENAI-LG-MUENCHEN-2025: GEMA v. OpenAI (2025).

Research Debt

  • Add Walters v. OpenAI (defamation / ChatGPT hallucinations) with a primary docket and any opinion.
  • Add Getty Images v. Stability AI (UK and U.S.) from judgments.
  • Add EU AI Act public-enforcement matters only with official documents.
  • Verify Garcia docket for any 2026 settlement or judgment before stating the case is resolved.
  • Defamation, biometric-privacy, and employment AI cases are not yet in this inventory.

Document metadata

  • Last verified: 2026-08-22

  1. SRC-THALER-V-PERLMUTTER-CADC — 130 F.4th 1039 (D.C. Cir. 2025). ↩

  2. SRC-USCO-AI-COPYRIGHTABILITY-REPORT-2025 — Copyright Office Part 2 report (Jan. 2025). ↩

  3. SRC-THOMSON-REUTERS-V-ROSS-2025 — D. Del. Feb. 11, 2025. ↩

  4. SRC-BARTZ-V-ANTHROPIC-FAIR-USE — N.D. Cal. June 23, 2025. ↩↩

  5. SRC-BARTZ-V-ANTHROPIC-FINAL-APPROVAL — N.D. Cal. July 20, 2026. ↩

  6. SRC-KADREY-V-META-FAIR-USE — 788 F. Supp. 3d 1026 (N.D. Cal. 2025). ↩↩

  7. SRC-NYT-V-OPENAI-MTD-2025 — S.D.N.Y. Apr. 4, 2025. ↩

  8. SRC-NYT-V-OPENAI-12C-2026 — S.D.N.Y. Aug. 6, 2026. ↩

  9. SRC-SPYDER-V-MEMENTUM-COMPLAINT — N.D. Cal. Nov. 26, 2025. Pending; allegations. ↩

  10. SRC-GARCIA-V-CHARACTER-MTD-2025 — M.D. Fla. May 20, 2025. Pleading-stage order. ↩↩↩

  11. SRC-UMG-V-SUNO-COMPLAINT — D. Mass. June 24, 2024. Pending. ↩

  12. SRC-UMG-V-UDIO-COMPLAINT — S.D.N.Y. June 2024. Pending. ↩

  13. SRC-CONCORD-V-ANTHROPIC-MTD-2025 — N.D. Cal. Oct. 6, 2025. ↩

  14. SRC-GEMA-V-OPENAI-LG-MUENCHEN-2025 — LG München I Nov. 11, 2025. Not final. ↩