Numerous cases have been brought against generative AI companies regarding copyright and misuse. Here are some of the companies being sued.
In June 2025, Reddit filed a lawsuit against the AI startup for allegedly unlawfully using the company's data. Reddit claims that Anthropic had used large amounts of personal data from Reddit users to train its AI models. According to the lawsuit, Anthropic scraped content from Reddit more than 100,000 times.
A class-action suit was filed against these companies involving GitHub's Copilot tool. The tool predictively generates code based on what the programmer has already written. The plaintiffs allege that Copilot copies and republishes code from GitHub without abiding by the requirements of GitHub's open source license, such as failing to provide attribution. The complaint also includes claims related to GitHub's mishandling of personal data and information, as well as claims of fraud. The complaint was filed in November 2022. Microsoft and GitHub have repeatedly tried to get the case dismissed.
A complaint against these AI image generator providers was filed in January 2023. The plaintiffs alleged the systems directly infringe on plaintiffs' copyrights by training on works created by the plaintiffs and creating unauthorized derivative works. The complaint also takes issue with the fact that the tools can be used to generate work in the style of artists. The judge on the case, William Orrick, said he was inclined to dismiss the lawsuit.
In January 2023, Getty Images issued a complaint against Stability AI for allegedly copying and processing millions of images and associated metadata owned by Getty in the U.K. Getty filed another lawsuit against Stability AI in the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware days later, which raised many copyright- and trademark-related claims, and pointed to "bizarre or grotesque" generated images that contained the Getty Images watermark and, therefore, damaged Getty's reputation.
In June 2025, Disney and Universal filed a complaint against the AI company, alleging copyright infringement. The AI startup enables users to input prompts to create images. The lawsuit claims that Midjourney is guilty of generating numerous unauthorized copies of Disney's and Universal's works, which are copyrighted.
Authors Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad are suing OpenAI for allegedly infringing on authors' copyrights. Butterick is one of the attorneys representing the authors. The complaint estimated that more than 300,000 books were copied in OpenAI's training data. The suit seeks an unspecified amount of money. The case was filed in June 2023.
The New York Times is suing OpenAI for copyright infringement. The case, filed December 2023, alleges that millions of New York Times articles were used to train and develop OpenAI's chatbot and other technology, which now competes with the news organization as a source of reliable information. The case also alleges that OpenAI's language models mimic the Time's style and recites its content verbatim. The Times is the first major American news outlet to sue OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement. The Times approached the companies earlier in the year to discuss the copyright issue but never reached an agreement.
Eight other newspapers filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft on April 30, 2024, alleging they've purloined millions of copyrighted news articles to train their AI. Newspapers included in the suit are The New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, Denver Post, Mercury News, Orange County Register, St. Paul Pioneer-Press, Orlando Sentinel and South Florida Sun Sentinel.
Sarah Silverman's lawsuit against Meta and OpenAI alleged copyright infringement and said ChatGPT and Large Language Model Meta AI (Llama) were trained on illegally acquired data sets with her work contained. The suit alleges the books were acquired from shadow libraries, such as Library Genesis, Z-Library and Bibliotek, where the books can be torrented. Torrenting is a common method of downloading files without proper legal permission. Specifically, Meta's language model, Llama, was trained on a data set called the Pile, which uses data from Bibliotek, according to a paper from EleutherAI, the company that assembled the Pile. The suit was filed in July 2023.
A class-action lawsuit is being brought against Google for alleged misuse of personal information and copyright infringement. Some of the data specified in the lawsuit includes photos from dating websites, Spotify playlists, TikTok videos and books used to train Bard. The lawsuit, filed in July 2023, said Google could owe at least $5 billion. The plaintiffs have elected to remain anonymous.
These copyright cases against big tech companies aren't the first of their kind. In 2015, the Author's Guild sued Google for making digital copies of millions of books and providing snippets of them to the public. The court ultimately favored Google, saying the works were transformative and did not provide a market substitute for the books.
Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Warner Records filed lawsuits against AI song-generator start-ups Suno and Udio in June 2024 for alleged copyright infringement. One lawsuit describes how Suno-generated songs sound very similar to Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” using prompts such as “1950s rock and roll,” “12-bar blues” and “energetic male vocalist.” The Udio lawsuit alleges something similar, saying many outputs sounded like Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas is You.” The record labels are seeking up to $150,000 for each work that was copied without permission.
