A handful of district courts now host the bulk of generative-AI litigation. The Northern District of California and the Southern District of New York lead by case volume; Delaware, D.C., and Munich are emerging.
The de facto AI court. Bartz v. Anthropic, Kadrey v. Meta, Andersen v. Stability, Concord Music v. Anthropic, Doe v. GitHub. Judges Alsup, Chhabria, Martínez-Olguín, and Tigar are setting the controlling fair-use precedent.
Publisher row. NYT v. OpenAI, Daily News v. OpenAI, Authors Guild MDL, and Dow Jones / NYP v. Perplexity. Judge Sidney Stein and Magistrate Judge Ona Wang have driven the discovery template the rest of the field follows.
Smaller AI docket but consequential. Hosts UMG v. Suno, parts of the Reddit-data downstream cases, and an emerging cluster of voice-cloning right-of-publicity actions.
Thomson Reuters v. Ross Intelligence (the first U.S. AI summary-judgment) and the Getty Images v. Stability AI U.S. component sit here. Judge Bibas's Westlaw opinion is now cited in nearly every books case.
Forum for federal-agency AI challenges and the Thaler v. Perlmutter copyright-registration appeal (no copyright in fully AI-generated works). Increasing FTC and SEC enforcement filings.
UMG v. Suno was filed here in June 2024. The case targets the Cambridge-based startup directly and is now coordinated with the parallel S.D.N.Y. Udio action.
Garcia v. Character.AI — the first U.S. ruling rejecting a §230 defense for generative AI output. Pre-dates several of the wrongful-death and minor-safety cases now consolidating elsewhere.
Forum for several state-AG and Republican-led challenges to AI-content regulation, plus the early Mata v. Avianca-derivative lawyer-sanctions matters that established the courtroom-hallucination case law.
Getty Images v. Stability AI tried in 2025. The court rejected the secondary-copyright "model weights as infringing copies" theory and the territorial-training claim, but found trademark infringement based on watermark reproduction in outputs.
GEMA v. OpenAI. The court's November 2024 decision held that ChatGPT's reproduction of song lyrics from GEMA's repertoire infringed, refusing to extend the EU text-and-data-mining exception to memorized output.
Several N.D. Cal. AI orders are headed here on interlocutory or post-judgment appeal. The Bartz settlement-approval order will likely face an appellate challenge from objecting class members.
The likely appellate destination for NYT v. OpenAI rulings on fair use, DMCA §1202, and the contested log-preservation order. Will set the controlling Second Circuit law on AI training and output liability.