Generative AI Copyright Infringement Litigation – OpenAI & Microsoft (Authors Guild)
Case Overview
In September 2023, the Authors Guild—joined by high-profile plaintiffs including John Grisham, Jodi Picoult, George R.R. Martin, and Jonathan Franzen—filed a sweeping class action lawsuit against OpenAI, Inc. and its largest investor Microsoft Corporation, alleging systematic and large-scale copyright infringement. The complaint alleges that OpenAI scraped and ingested the plaintiffs' copyrighted books, novels, and non-fiction works without license or consent to train its large language models, including GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, which power the ChatGPT service. Plaintiffs argue that their works were not merely incidentally copied but were central to training a commercial product that now directly competes with human authorship in the marketplace.
The lawsuit is one of several parallel copyright actions against generative AI companies, including a separate suit by The New York Times against OpenAI and Microsoft over news article ingestion, filed in December 2023. Authors argue that OpenAI's commercial success—valued at over $80 billion—was built on the unauthorized use of their intellectual property, and they seek actual damages, disgorgement of profits, and a court order requiring OpenAI to license authors' works going forward. OpenAI has asserted a fair use defense, arguing that training AI models constitutes transformative use of copyrighted material. The case is being closely watched as a defining test of how copyright law applies to generative artificial intelligence.
Who May Qualify
Authors, novelists, journalists, and other creators whose copyrighted written works—including books, articles, short stories, or essays—were published before the training cutoff dates of GPT-3, GPT-3.5, or GPT-4 (generally before early 2023) and were potentially included in OpenAI's training datasets without a license.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can authors sue OpenAI for using their books to train ChatGPT?
Yes. The Authors Guild class action represents thousands of authors who allege OpenAI used their copyrighted works without permission to train its AI models. Individual authors who believe their published works were used may be able to join or opt into the class. Consulting an intellectual property attorney is advisable.
What is OpenAI's defense in the Authors Guild copyright lawsuit?
OpenAI has argued that training AI models on publicly available text constitutes 'fair use' under copyright law because the process is transformative—the model learns patterns rather than reproducing specific text. This fair use question is the central legal issue in the case and remains unresolved.
How much could authors get from a settlement with OpenAI?
No settlement has been reached as of mid-2025. Potential damages could be substantial given the scale of alleged infringement, but the amount any individual author might recover would depend on how their works were used, the number of class members, and the ultimate outcome of the fair use defense.
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