Thomson Reuters v. Ross

Thomson Reuters Enterprise Centre GMBH and West Publishing Corporation

Ross Intelligence Inc.

Legal assistant

May 2020

Partial summary judgement issued on February 11, 2025. Thomson Reuters won

US District Court - Delaware

In the first known AI copyright lawsuit filed, Thomson Reuters alleges that now-defunct legal research startup Ross Intelligence violated its copyright by reproducing headnotes from Westlaw, which Thomson Reuters owns, with the intention of training a legal AI tool.

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Doe v. GitHub

John Does 1-5

Github, Microsoft, and OpenAI

Virtual assistant

Nov. 2022

In progress

US District Court - Northern District of California

The first class action lawsuit concerning generative AI was brought by five anonymous GitHub contributors who object to how the Microsoft-owned code platform’s Copilot and Codex tools were trained. Notably, this case focused on alleged violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

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Anderson v. Stability AI

Sarah Anderson, Karla Ortiz, Grzegorz Rutkowski, Gregory Manchess, Gerald Brom, Jingna Zhang, Julia Kaye, and Adam Ellis

Stability AI, Runway AI, Deviant Art, and Midjourney

Image generator

Jan. 2023

In progress

US District Court - Northern District of California

The first class action lawsuit brought by visual artists against AI companies. The artists allege that four firms trained image generators on their work without their consent.

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Getty Images v. Stability AI

Getty Images

Stability AI

Image generator

Feb. 2023

In progress

US District Court - Delaware

Getty Images alleges that Stability AI violated its copyright by taking more than 12 million of Getty’s photographs, along with corresponding captions and metadata, to train its AI image generator, Stable Diffusion

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Kadrey v. Meta

Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, Christopher Golden, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Junot Díaz, Andrew Sean Greer, David Henry Hwang, Matthew Klam, Laura Lippman, Rachel Louise Snyder, Jacqueline Woodson, and Christopher Farnsworth

Meta

Text generator

July 2023

In progress

US District Court - Northern District of California

A group of high-profile authors, including comedian Sarah Silverman and Ta-Nehesi Coates, allege that Meta used their writing to train its large language model Llama without their permission

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In re OpenAI ChatGPT Litigation

Paul Tremblay, Sarah Silverman, Christopher Golden, Richard Kadrey, Michael Chabon, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Junot Díaz, Andrew Sean Greer, David Henry Hwang, Matthew Klam, Laura Lippman, Rachel Louise Snyder, Ayelet Waldman, and Jacqueline Woodson

OpenAI

Text generator

July 2023

In progress

US District Court - Northern District of California

A group of high-profile authors, including comedian Sarah Silverman and Ta-Nehesi Coates, allege that OpenAI unlawfully trained several of its large language models on their work. This lawsuit was originally three separate cases, which have been consolidated into one. The first was filed in June 2023.

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In re Google Generative AI Copyright Litigation

Jill Leovy, Jingna Zhang, Sarah Andersen, Hope Larson, and Jessica Fink

Google

Text generator and image generator

July 2023

In progress

US District Court - Northern District of California

Journalist Jill Leovy kicked off this litigation in July 2023, alleging Google scraped her data from the internet to train its language models. (She was initially joined by other writer plaintiffs, but they later left the case.) Her lawsuit was recently consolidated with a case brought by visual artists alleging that Google trained text-to-image generation tools on images of their work without permission.

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Authors Guild v. OpenAI

Jonathan Alter, The Authors Guild, David Baldacci, Kai Bird, Mary Bly, Taylor Branch, Rich Cohen, Michael Connelly, Sylvia Day, Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham, Elin Hilderbrand, Christina Baker Kline, Victor LaValle, Eugene Linden, George R.R. Martin, Daniel Okrent, Jodi Picoult, Douglas Preston, Roxana Robinson, Julian Sancton, George Saunders, Stacy Schiff, Hampton Sides, James Shapiro, Jia Tolentino, Scott Turow, Simon Winchester, Rachel Vail, Nicholas A. Basbanes, and Nicholas Ngagoyeanes

OpenAI

Text generator

Sept. 2023

In progress

US District Court - Southern District of New York

Three separate cases, including one brought by The Authors Guild, a professional organization for writers, have been consolidated into one. The plaintiffs allege that OpenAI infringed on the copyright of a long list of high-profile authors, including George R.R. Martin and Jia Tolentino, by using their work to train its AI models without permission.

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Huckabee v. Meta

Mike Huckabee, Relevate Group, David Kinnaman, Tsh Oxenreider, Lysa TerKeurst, and John Blase

Bloomberg

Text generator

Oct. 2023

In progress

US District Court - Southern District of New York

Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee and a group of Christian writers allege that Bloomberg violated their copyright by training its large language model, BloombergGPT, on their books without permission. (When this case was initially filed in October 2023, Meta and the nonprofit EleutherAI were also listed as defendants; it has since been amended, but the case name remains the same.)

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Concord Music Group v. Anthropic

Concord Music Group, Universal Music Publishing Group, and ABKCO Music

Anthropic

Text generator

Oct. 2023

In progress

US District Court - Northern District of California

A group of music publishers is suing Anthropic, alleging that the AI company’s text generators were trained on their copyrighted lyrics. This is the first music industry AI copyright case, but it concerns only copyrighted words, rather than musical scores or recordings. This case was originally brought in Tennessee but later moved to Northern California.

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