Alter v. OpenAI Inc.

On 3 April 2025, Alter v. OpenAI was transferred and consolidated into the multidistrict litigation (MDL), In re OpenAI Copyright Infringement, before the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York for coordinated pre-trial proceedings.

Alter v. OpenAI is a proposed class action filed on 21 November 2023 by distinguished authors Jonathan Alter, Kai Bird, Taylor Branch, Rich Cohen, Eugene Linden, Daniel Okrent, Julian Sancton, Hampton Sides, Stacy Schiff, James Shapiro, Jia Tolentino, and Simon Winchester, representing a class of professional writers, including multiple New York Times bestsellers and Pulitzer Prize winners. The plaintiffs allege that OpenAI and Microsoft copied and data-mined copyrighted nonfiction books without consent or compensation to train OpenAI’s GPT models (GPT-3, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4). The complaint claims these models were trained on datasets such as Books1, Books2, Common Crawl, WebText2, and Wikipedia, reproducing protected language, structure, and expression from copyrighted texts. The action asserts two counts: Copyright infringement (17 U.S.C. § 501) against OpenAI and Microsoft; and Contributory infringement against Microsoft and OpenAI entities, alleging Microsoft funded and engineered OpenAI’s supercomputing infrastructure, knowingly facilitating and materially contributing to the large-scale infringement underpinning ChatGPT’s development.

This summary is provided for educational and research purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Allegations described are those made in the filings. Please consult the underlying source documents.