Is OpenAI being sued? Yes — and the docket is unusually crowded
OpenAI is currently the most-sued AI company in the world, with active litigation across copyright, defamation, privacy, and antitrust. Here is what is on the docket and how the major cases interact.
Short answer: yes, OpenAI is being sued — repeatedly, across multiple legal theories, in courts on three continents. As of this writing, OpenAI is named as a defendant in 41 AI-related lawsuits we track on this site, more than any other AI company. The cases fall into five families.
1. The news-publisher cases
The flagship is New York Times v. OpenAI and Microsoft, filed December 2023 in the SDNY. The Times alleges OpenAI trained GPT models on millions of Times articles without authorization and that ChatGPT regurgitates Times content nearly verbatim. The case has survived motion to dismiss and is in active discovery.
Behind it is a coalition: Daily News, Tribune Publishing, U.S. News, the Center for Investigative Reporting, and a long list of regional papers — most filed in the SDNY in 2024-2025 and now organized for coordinated discovery. OpenAI's exposure here is substantial because publisher plaintiffs have both willful-infringement theories and direct DMCA Section 1202 claims (removal of copyright management information from training data).
2. The Authors Guild MDL
Authors Guild v. OpenAI is the umbrella for MDL 3143 — roughly a dozen author and publisher class actions consolidated in April 2025 in the SDNY before Judge Sidney H. Stein, with Magistrate Judge Ona T. Wang handling discovery. The consolidated docket pulls in cases from both the Northern District of California and the Southern District of New York, including the New York Times, Daily News, Tremblay, Silverman, Chabon, and Raw Story actions. On October 27, 2025, Judge Stein denied OpenAI's motion to dismiss the output-based infringement claims — clearing the way for discovery on whether ChatGPT's outputs themselves are infringing. After Bartz v. Anthropic settled in 2025, the MDL became the next major test of training-data fair-use law for books.
3. International cases
GEMA v. OpenAI, decided at first instance by the Munich Regional Court I in November 2025, is the largest non-US ruling against OpenAI to date. The court found that ChatGPT's reproduction of song lyrics was not protected by the EU DSM Directive Article 4 TDM exception. OpenAI has appealed. There is also a separate proceeding in Italy, an investigation in France, and a Folha de S.Paulo case in Brazil.
4. Privacy, defamation, and product cases
A growing tail of cases targets ChatGPT outputs rather than training inputs. There are defamation suits where ChatGPT fabricated criminal allegations about identifiable people. There are privacy claims over how OpenAI handles user prompts. And there are emerging product-liability theories around chat companions and minors.
5. Securities and antitrust
OpenAI's corporate structure has drawn investor and contract-based litigation, including disputes related to the Microsoft partnership. While these are not "AI training" cases in the copyright sense, they shape OpenAI's regulatory and commercial risk profile materially.
How OpenAI compares to peers
OpenAI faces materially more litigation than Anthropic or Meta. See our side-by-side comparisons: OpenAI vs. Anthropic, OpenAI vs. Meta, and NYT v. OpenAI vs. NYT v. Perplexity. The full company profile lives at OpenAI defendant profile.
Frequently asked questions
How many lawsuits does OpenAI face?
As of the most recent update, OpenAI is named in 41 AI-related lawsuits across the US, Germany, Italy, India, and Brazil. The complete list is maintained at /companies/openai/ and verified weekly against public dockets.
What is the largest OpenAI lawsuit?
By stakes, the New York Times v. OpenAI and Microsoft case in the SDNY is generally regarded as the largest. By number of plaintiffs, the Authors Guild MDL — covering hundreds of thousands of book authors — is broader.
Has OpenAI settled any AI lawsuits?
OpenAI has reached individual settlements with several smaller publishers. As of the most recent update, no class-wide settlement has been reached in the major copyright cases.
Where can I read the OpenAI court filings?
Each individual case page on this site links directly to the PACER docket and to the free CourtListener mirror. Foreign court records link to the equivalent registry.