Which AI companies have been sued? The complete 2026 list
More than 50 AI companies are named as defendants in active or resolved AI-related litigation. Here is the full list, organized by tier — and what each company is actually being sued for.
At least 54 AI companies appear as named defendants in lawsuits we track. The list spans foundation-model labs, image-generation startups, music-AI products, and the cloud and chip companies they build on. Below, the major defendants organized by tier.
Tier 1: foundation-model labs (highest exposure)
These are the labs whose general-purpose models trained on copyrighted material at scale. They face the largest copyright dockets.
- OpenAI — most-sued AI company; publisher coalition + Authors Guild MDL + GEMA.
- Anthropic — settled the largest AI training class for $1.5B (Bartz).
- Meta — Kadrey v. Meta (Meta won summary judgment on training in June 2025; distribution claims continue) and other LLaMA training-data actions.
- Google — In re Google Generative AI Copyright Litigation; Gemini-related class actions.
- Microsoft — co-defendant in NYT v. OpenAI and named in several publisher cases.
Tier 2: image and video generation
- Stability AI — Getty Images v. Stability (UK + D. Del.); Andersen v. Stability artist class.
- Midjourney — Disney/Universal v. Midjourney (the largest US image-AI case).
- Runway — emerging individual and class actions.
- Hugging Face — named in the Andersen v. Stability class as a model-distribution defendant.
Tier 3: music AI
- Suno — UMG v. Suno, RIAA-coordinated copyright suit.
- Udio — UMG v. Uncharted Labs (Udio), RIAA-coordinated copyright suit.
Tier 4: search and answer engines
- Perplexity — NYT v. Perplexity, Forbes-related publisher claims.
- Cohere — Advance Local Media v. Cohere (regional newspapers coalition).
Tier 5: chat companions and consumer products
- Character.AI — Garcia v. Character (wrongful-death) and the P.J. v. Character class.
- xAI — Doe v. xAI emerging class.
And the long tail
Beyond the headline defendants, the database tracks AI-related litigation against Apple, Amazon, Bytedance/TikTok, Nvidia, Mistral, GitHub, BigBear.ai, C3.ai, Cerebras, Bloomberg, Workday, Anna's Archive, and many more. The complete list — and a per-company breakdown of every case — lives at /companies/.
Frequently asked questions
How many AI companies have been sued?
At least 54 distinct AI companies are named as defendants in lawsuits tracked on this site. The number grows roughly weekly as new cases are filed and verified.
Which AI company has the most lawsuits?
OpenAI is currently the most-sued AI company, named in dozens of active or resolved cases including the New York Times case, the Authors Guild MDL, and GEMA v. OpenAI.
Has any AI company won a fair-use ruling?
Partial wins exist (notably the Bartz court accepting that training itself may be transformative), but no AI company has secured a clean appellate fair-use ruling at the Ninth Circuit or Federal Circuit level. The doctrinal question remains live.