Today, the parties on both sides in the MDL Litigation, In re OpenAI Copyright Infringement Litigation, will file their respective motions for summary judgment. Collectively, the plaintiffs are often grouped as the “News” Plaintiffs involving the New York Times and other news media and the “Class” Plaintiffs involving book authors and the Authors Guild. OpenAI and Microsoft are the two defendants.
As shown below, the OpenAI litigation is the cluster of cases now in the summary judgment stage (click on image to visit the case tracker):
This is big moment in all of the AI Litigation as it involves the most lawsuits being decided at once. All of them were filed against OpenAI and Microsoft. Also, the OpenAI litigation is one of the few other cases to enter the summary judgment stage in 2026, after last year’s fair use decisions in Bartz v. Anthropic and Kadrey v. Meta. We should anticipate decisions on fair use potentially in this case, In re Mosaic LLM Litigation before Judge Breyer, and Concord Music I v. Anthropic before Judge Lee. No other AI cases will enter summary judgment this year, if my memory is correct.
The stakes in the OpenAI litigation were made even more apparent by the Statement of Interest filed by the United States in this case, earlier this week. The United States took the position that AI training is an “extraordinarily transformative” (p. 12) fair use purpose in developing LLMs, a new technology. The United States also stated that the new theory of market harm called “dilution” advanced by some plaintiffs is “deeply flawed” (p. 15) and should be rejected. The United States also expressed both a national interest (p. 1) and a national security interest (p. 2) in the advancement and development of AI by U.S. companies.
Back in 2025, we ran a feature on Judge Sidney Stein, who presides over the MDL litigation:
Earlier, Judge Stein denied OpenAI’s motion to dismiss the output infringement claim:
We will be posting briefs as they are filed. The Page for briefs is here: