Where AI Meets Copyright Law:
The Ongoing Battles in the Courts

by Robert S. Want
(Following blog updated on June 1, 2026.
Originally published Nov 26, 2025.)

Introduction  
The intersection of artificial intelligence and copyright law has emerged as one of the most significant legal battlegrounds of the modern era, with around 100 cases currently pending across U.S. federal courts that challenge chatbot training on copyrighted material, and much more litigation certain to follow in the months and years ahead.

These lawsuits fundamentally challenge whether AI companies can legally use copyrighted materials to train their models and whether AI-generated outputs infringe on the rights of original creators. The litigation encompasses multiple industries — publishing, visual arts, music, and journalism — and involves billions of dollars in potential damages.

This article (which will be updated as conditions warrant) examines the current landscape of AI-copyright litigation, with particular attention to the consolidated cases brought by The New York Times and other news organizations and authors against OpenAI and Microsoft, and the groundbreaking $1.5 billion AI settlement reached by Anthropic AI in September 2024.

Copyright-Litigation.com focuses on the inevitable conflict between content creators and the ever more powerful chatbots (also known as AI assistants), such as ChatGPT (OpenAI), Claude (Anthropic) and Gemini (Google). The referees are the federal judges presiding over the litigation, attemping to call balls and strikes. (These cases are in federal court because U.S. copyright law is federal law, giving federal courts exclusive jurisdiction over infringement claims.)

In their rulings, the judges must apply copyright law as it currently exists to a new arena — an arena involving AI companies training their models on massive amounts of copyrighted material and users generating output from the models.

We will closely follow this legal battle as it plays out.

This website is edited and published by Robert S. Want (rwant@LegalEditor.com), who has closely followed copyright issues throughout his career in legal publishing.  Mr. Want also edits and publishes other websites focusing on new litigation in other areas of the law (see below).

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