OpenAI Lawsuits

Plaintiff. The New York Times Company. Filed December 27, 2023 in the Southern District of New York. Microsoft is a co-defendant alongside OpenAI because the complaint reaches the use of OpenAI models inside Microsoft's Bing Chat / Copilot products as well as inside ChatGPT.

Theory of liability. Two intertwined claims. First, that OpenAI copied millions of Times articles into the training corpus without licensing them — the same training-input theory at issue in Bartz v. Anthropic on the books side. Second, that the resulting models reproduce paywalled Times content in outputs and are marketed as substitutes for a Times subscription — a market-substitution claim that goes beyond a pure ingestion theory. Plaintiffs added DMCA Section 1202 (copyright-management-information) claims and a tortious-interference claim alongside the direct copyright counts.

Procedural posture. Judge Stein resolved the motions to dismiss across the Times, Daily News, and CIR actions in a single opinion dated April 4, 2025. He denied OpenAI's motions to dismiss the direct-infringement claims reaching conduct more than three years before the complaints were filed, denied the motions to dismiss the contributory-infringement claims, and dismissed the common-law unfair-competition-by-misappropriation claims with prejudice. On the DMCA side he dismissed the Times's Section 1202(b)(1) claim and every Section 1202(b)(3) claim without prejudice, while letting the Section 1202(b)(1) claims proceed against OpenAI in the Daily News and CIR actions. Separately, on April 3, 2025 the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation centralized twelve OpenAI copyright actions before Judge Stein as MDL No. 3143, In re: OpenAI, Inc., Copyright Infringement Litigation, with Magistrate Judge Ona T. Wang handling discovery; the Times case is the lead News-track case inside it.

Where the schedule stands. Under the operative case schedule (entered March 23, 2026), expert discovery closes August 3, 2026, summary-judgment and Daubert motions are due September 4, 2026, oppositions October 9, and replies November 6. OpenAI moved for judgment on the pleadings against the News plaintiffs on June 11, 2026; the Times opposed on June 25 and cross-moved for leave to file a third amended complaint, and that motion was fully briefed on July 13. The News plaintiffs moved for sanctions against OpenAI on July 9, 2026 over its representations about whether chat logs and training datasets could be searched for their works; the court ordered a briefing schedule on July 14. Discovery has otherwise produced sustained fights over the training-corpus contents, OpenAI's deletion of the Books1 and Books2 datasets, attorney-client privilege over that deletion, and the methodology behind the Times's output-reproduction examples.

Why it matters. This is the single most-watched fair-use case against a generative-AI defendant. Where Bartz resolved the books-side training question on summary judgment via the Alsup ruling (training fair use; piracy not), NYT v. OpenAI tests the same line in a different posture — news articles instead of books, market substitution as a theory, and the Second Circuit instead of the Ninth.

What to watch next. Summary judgment is the inflection point, when the court has to apply fair use against a developed factual record on training inputs and output behavior. The motions land September 4, 2026 and are fully briefed November 6; no hearing date has been set. Whether the court adopts or distinguishes the Alsup framing will reset the precedent map. Ahead of that, the pending judgment-on-the-pleadings motion and the sanctions motion are the two live decision points.

Plaintiffs. The Authors Guild and a class of book authors including George R. R. Martin, John Grisham, Jodi Picoult, David Baldacci, Michael Connelly, Jonathan Franzen, Elin Hilderbrand, and George Saunders. Filed September 2023 in the Southern District of New York. The parallel author class actions originally filed in the Northern District of California (Tremblay, Silverman, Chabon, and the Millette YouTube-transcript action) were transferred into the same court by the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation on April 3, 2025, alongside the Alter and Basbanes S.D.N.Y. class actions.

Theory of liability. The same training-input copyright theory at issue in Bartz v. Anthropic on the books side: that OpenAI copied entire copyrighted books into the training corpus to train GPT-3, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4, infringing the authors' exclusive reproduction right. The consolidated complaint also pleads an output-side theory — that ChatGPT itself generates infringing derivatives of the plaintiffs' books. The Northern California branch of the litigation added DMCA Section 1202, negligence, and unjust-enrichment counts; most of those non-direct-infringement claims were dismissed in early-2024 motion practice, and the direct copyright claims survive.

Procedural posture. After centralization the court ordered a single Consolidated Class Action Complaint, filed June 13, 2025 under the caption David Baldacci, et al. v. OpenAI, Inc., et al. On October 27, 2025 Judge Stein denied OpenAI's motion to dismiss the output-based direct-infringement claim in that complaint, holding that the allegations state a prima facie infringement claim as to at least some ChatGPT outputs. The class track then moved into expert discovery on the joint MDL schedule. Class certification has not been briefed: under a February 11, 2026 stipulation and order, opening class-certification motions are due 21 days after the court rules on the summary-judgment motions, so the fair-use ruling comes first. Settlement discussions have been reported intermittently in trade-press coverage; no settlement has been entered.

Why it matters. This is the OpenAI-side equivalent of Bartz: the same plaintiff archetype (named book authors), the same theory (training on copyrighted books without license), the same defense (training is transformative fair use). The Anthropic case settled before trial; whether the OpenAI case follows that path or pushes through to a substantive fair-use ruling will set the second federal-trial-court line on the question.

What to watch next. Summary judgment first (motions due September 4, 2026, replies November 6), then class certification 21 days after that ruling. Counsel on both sides have publicly cited Bartz in filings.

Cases in the cluster.

• Daily News, Tribune, MediaNews Group, et al. v. OpenAI & Microsoft (S.D.N.Y., 24-cv-3285, April 2024). A coalition of eight regional newspaper publishers including the New York Daily News, the Chicago Tribune, the Denver Post, the Orlando Sentinel, the San Jose Mercury News, the Orange County Register, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, and the Sun-Sentinel. Owned in part by Alden Global Capital. Same training-corpus and output-reproduction theory as NYT, plus trademark-dilution claims that survived the April 2025 motion-to-dismiss opinion alongside its Section 1202(b)(1) claim against OpenAI.
• Center for Investigative Reporting (Mother Jones / Reveal) v. OpenAI & Microsoft (S.D.N.Y., 24-cv-4872, June 2024). The first nonprofit-news plaintiff in the docket. CIR alleges its investigative reporting was ingested into the training corpus without license and that ChatGPT reproduces it on demand without attribution. Its Section 1202(b)(1) claim against OpenAI survived the April 2025 motion-to-dismiss opinion; its “abridgment” claims were dismissed with prejudice.
• The Intercept Media v. OpenAI & Microsoft (S.D.N.Y., 24-cv-1515, February 2024). Pleads DMCA Section 1202 violations — that copyright-management information (author bylines, publication dates) was stripped from Intercept articles during training. Judge Rakoff declined to dismiss the Section 1202(b)(1) claim, issuing a bottom-line order in November 2024 and a full opinion on February 20, 2025 holding that the alleged CMI-removal injury is the kind of harm traditionally actionable in copyright; the claims against Microsoft were dismissed because they reached only OpenAI's training.
• Raw Story Media & AlterNet Media v. OpenAI & Microsoft (S.D.N.Y., 24-cv-1514, February 2024). Companion DMCA Section 1202 case to The Intercept, and the one that came out the other way: Judge McMahon dismissed the Section 1202 claims in November 2024 for lack of Article III standing, holding that no concrete injury had been pleaded. The district case was closed on June 18, 2025 and plaintiffs appealed. The appeal is docketed in the Second Circuit as No. 25-1756, In re: OpenAI, Inc. Copyright Infringement Litigation; it was briefed through December 2025 and argued on March 18, 2026. As of this update no decision has issued.
• Later publisher and reference-work plaintiffs. The multidistrict litigation has kept absorbing new members since centralization — among them Ziff Davis (CNET, IGN, Mashable, Everyday Health), Encyclopaedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster, Gracenote, and Richner Communications. Several of the later-filed actions have been stayed by stipulation pending resolution of the summary-judgment motions in the lead cases.

Theory of liability. Two-track. The Daily News coalition and CIR run the direct-copyright theory: training-corpus ingestion plus output reproduction, on the same logic as the Times. The Intercept and Raw Story cases are the DMCA Section 1202 frontier — the claim that removing or altering CMI during training is itself a statutory violation independent of the underlying infringement question.

Procedural posture. All of these cases were centralized before Judge Stein on April 3, 2025 as part of MDL No. 3143, so the informal S.D.N.Y. coordination became a formal multidistrict litigation with a single joint case schedule. The News track is in expert discovery and heading into summary judgment on the same September 2026 – November 2026 briefing calendar as the Times. OpenAI's June 2026 motion for judgment on the pleadings runs against the Daily News coalition as well as the Times, and the coalition joined the July 9, 2026 sanctions motion. The Raw Story standing appeal is under submission in the Second Circuit.

Why it matters. The publisher coalition tests two things the Times case alone doesn't reach: (1) whether the same training-fair-use analysis travels across publisher size, business model (for-profit chain, nonprofit, alternative weekly), and content type; and (2) whether DMCA Section 1202 is a viable independent theory against AI training. Because Raw Story and The Intercept came out opposite ways in the same district, the Second Circuit's ruling on the Raw Story standing appeal is the load-bearing piece for the latter.

What to watch next. The Second Circuit decision in No. 25-1756 on Article III standing for DMCA Section 1202 claims, argued March 18, 2026 and outstanding since. Then the summary-judgment round, which will test whether the fair-use analysis reads across cleanly from the Times to a regional chain and a nonprofit newsroom.

Plaintiff. Elon Musk, individually and (in the federal refiling) as the controlling owner of xAI Corp. Musk was an OpenAI cofounder and board member from 2015 until his February 2018 departure, and had committed (per the complaint) approximately $44 million in startup funding before his exit.

Procedural history. Filed February 29, 2024 in California state court (San Francisco Superior). Voluntarily dismissed by Musk in June 2024 on the eve of a scheduled hearing on OpenAI's demurrer. Refiled August 2024 in the Northern District of California with an expanded complaint adding federal RICO claims and additional defendants (including Microsoft and several individual board members). The refiling triggered a second motion-to-dismiss round; some claims were dismissed and others survived. Musk separately sought a preliminary injunction to block OpenAI's for-profit conversion, which the court denied in February 2025 while leaving the underlying breach claims in place. The October 2025 recapitalization closed without injunctive interference. OpenAI's counterclaims against Musk survived his motion to dismiss on August 12, 2025 and were held for a second phase.

The trial, and what it did and did not decide. Phase I opened in front of Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers on April 28, 2026 in Oakland and ran fourteen trial days. On May 18, 2026 the advisory jury returned a defense verdict finding the tried claims barred by the statute of limitations, and the remaining trial dates were vacated. Two days later, on May 20, 2026, the court entered a Post-Trial Order Re: Advisory Verdict confirming that it had empaneled the jury in an advisory capacity, that it adopted the advisory verdict, and that its on-the-record statements at trial stand as its findings of fact and conclusions of law under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 52(a). That order disposes of the claims that were tried — the founding-agreement, fiduciary-duty, and related counts. It is not a judgment ending the case: no final judgment has been entered, and no notice of appeal has been filed as of this update. Musk publicly characterized the outcome as a “calendar technicality” and said he would appeal.

What is still live. On June 10, 2026 the court ordered the parties to propose a briefing schedule for plaintiffs' remaining claims, and the parties' June 24 stipulation identifies them: Sherman Act § 1 and § 2, Clayton Act § 3 and § 7, Cartwright Act §§ 16720 and 16727, California's Unfair Practices Act and UCL § 17200, and the Lanham Act. OpenAI and Microsoft each file a supplemental opening brief by August 10, 2026, Musk and xAI oppose by September 24, and replies are due October 26. Musk's answer to OpenAI's counterclaims is due August 10, 2026. On July 1, 2026 the court appointed R. David Proctor as mediator — with authority reaching all claims that have not reached final judgment, expressly including the antitrust claims — and conditionally appointed him special master for litigation planning if mediation fails.

Theory of liability. Not copyright. The complaint pleads breach of contract (the “founding agreement” alleged to be embodied in the original 2015 articles of incorporation, the early board materials, and Musk's email correspondence with Altman and Brockman), breach of fiduciary duty against the cofounder defendants in their officer-and-director capacities, unjust enrichment, false advertising, unfair competition, and (in the federal refiling) racketeering and wire-fraud predicates supporting the civil RICO claim. The animating allegation is that OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit committed to safe, broadly-shared AGI and was converted into a for-profit business operating as Microsoft's contractual partner, in betrayal of the founding promise.

Why it matters. This is the dispute over OpenAI's corporate structure that every other piece of the docket touches. The November 2023 board episode, the 2024 leadership exodus, the 2024 – 2025 for-profit-conversion fight, and Microsoft's contractual position all sit downstream of the same structural question: what was OpenAI agreed to be, and who has standing to enforce that. Musk v. Altman is the case that puts the question into a federal courtroom directly. It is part legal docket and part corporate-governance episode — the broader for-profit-conversion narrative lives on the OpenAI Leadership page alongside the November 2023 board episode; the xAI-side governance angle (Musk-personal-control governance, the merger chain, and the political-entanglement framing) lives on the xAI Leadership page's Musk political-entanglement subsection; the legal-procedure half lives here.

What to watch next. The supplemental briefing on the surviving antitrust and Lanham Act counts, which runs August 10 to October 26, 2026 and is the next dispositive round. Whether court-ordered mediation resolves the case before that briefing concludes. Whether the court enters a partial final judgment under Rule 54(b) on the tried claims — the trigger that would start Musk's appeal clock on the charter theory. And whether OpenAI presses its counterclaims once Musk answers them.

Plaintiffs. Anonymous open-source software developers (proceeding as Doe 1, Doe 2, etc.) on behalf of a putative class of GitHub repository owners whose code was used to train the Codex model that powered the original GitHub Copilot. Filed November 3, 2022 in the Northern District of California. Defendants are GitHub, Microsoft, and OpenAI — OpenAI as the trainer of the Codex model GitHub deployed.

Theory of liability. The complaint pleaded a stack of theories layered on top of the core training-data copyright claim: direct copyright infringement, DMCA Section 1202 violations (CMI stripping during training), open-source license violations (MIT, Apache, GPL, BSD attribution requirements), breach of contract on the GitHub Terms of Service, unfair competition, and unjust enrichment.

Procedural posture. The court dismissed most of the layered claims early. The DMCA Section 1202 counts were dismissed for lack of plausible identicality between the trained outputs and the asserted source code. The open-source license claims were dismissed for failure to plead the elements of contract formation and breach with particularity. What survives is the core direct-copyright infringement theory, on a narrower factual basis — specifically tied to outputs that reproduce identifiable copyrighted code from named plaintiffs' repositories.

The Ninth Circuit appeal. Judge Tigar certified the Section 1202 identicality holding for interlocutory review, and on December 19, 2024 the Ninth Circuit granted the plaintiffs permission to appeal; the appeal is docketed as No. 24-7700. It was briefed through September 2025 and argued and submitted on February 11, 2026 before Judges Sidney R. Thomas, Eric D. Miller, and Stanley Blumenfeld. No decision has issued as of this update. The district-court docket has carried only ministerial filings — counsel appearances and withdrawals — since the appeal was taken, so the case's forward motion is entirely in the court of appeals right now. No final judgment has been entered, which is why the row still reads Active rather than On Appeal.

Why it matters. Doe v. GitHub Copilot was the first major lawsuit specifically targeting generative-AI training, and the early dismissals shaped the pleading map for everything that came after. Plaintiffs' counsel in subsequent cases (including Tremblay and Silverman) explicitly trimmed their DMCA Section 1202 and unjust-enrichment theories in response to the Doe dismissals, and the surviving direct-copyright frame became the dominant theory across the AI-training docket. The case also tested whether open-source licenses are reachable through training; the answer so far is “not as pleaded.”

What to watch next. The Ninth Circuit's decision on the Section 1202 identicality standard, submitted since February 11, 2026 — a reversal would revive CMI claims across the code-training docket and would sit awkwardly against the Second Circuit's pending answer to the adjacent standing question in Raw Story. After that, whether the surviving direct-copyright claims reach class certification with the anonymized plaintiffs, and whether Copilot's evolution beyond the original Codex model alters the factual posture of the output-reproduction theory.

Plaintiffs. Families of decedents and individual users. Raine v. OpenAI (San Francisco Superior, CGC-25-628528) was filed in August 2025 by Matthew and Maria Raine over the death of their sixteen-year-old son and is the case that opened the track. The coordinated group also includes Fox, Shamblin, Madden, Brooks, and Gray (Los Angeles Superior), Lacey, Enneking, Irwin, and First County Bank (San Francisco Superior), DeCruise (San Diego Superior), and Jacquez (Alameda Superior). OpenAI, Sam Altman, and several OpenAI entities are named as defendants.

Theory of liability. Not copyright. The complaints plead strict product liability for defective design, failure to warn, negligence, and wrongful death — that ChatGPT was released without adequate safety testing, that its conversational design reinforced delusional thinking and suicidal ideation rather than interrupting it, and that OpenAI knew the risk. The framing treats a language model as a consumer product subject to ordinary product-safety law, which is what makes the track structurally different from everything else on this page.

Procedural posture. Petitioners moved to coordinate eight of the cases; the petition was heard January 30, 2026 before Judge Stephen M. Murphy in Department 606 of the San Francisco Superior Court, and on February 3, 2026 the court granted it and swept in four add-on cases, creating Judicial Council Coordination Proceeding No. 5431, ChatGPT Product Liability Cases. San Francisco was recommended as the site and the First Appellate District designated as the reviewing court. All included actions were stayed pending assignment of a coordination trial judge, with the stay expressly not excusing the parties from meeting and conferring on outstanding discovery; the defendants' separately-noticed stay motion was taken off calendar as moot. Parallel federal actions on the same theory have started arriving — two were filed in the Northern District of Florida on July 14, 2026 against OpenAI Foundation, OpenAI Group PBC, and Altman, docketed as personal-injury product-liability cases.

Why it matters. Every other case on this page asks what OpenAI was allowed to read. This one asks what its product was allowed to say. Coordination is procedural rather than a finding of liability, but it is the marker that AI-harm litigation has moved from isolated complaints to a mass-tort posture, and it puts OpenAI's safety-testing record and its handling of self-harm conversations into discovery in a way the copyright docket never reaches.

What to watch next. Assignment of a coordination trial judge and the lifting of the stay; bellwether selection and the scope of discovery into OpenAI's pre-release safety testing; demurrers testing whether model outputs are a “product” at all and whether Section 230 or the First Amendment reaches them; and whether the federal filings consolidate separately or get removed and remanded.