Andersen v. Stability AI Ltd.

Artists allege AI companies scraped their copyrighted artworks without permission to train Stable Diffusion. Visual artists Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz filed a landmark class action in January 2023 against Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt, alleging their AI image generators used billions of copyrighted artworks without permission to train Stable Diffusion.

The case was triggered by Andersen's discovery that simply inputting her name into Stable Diffusion generated new images mimicking her distinctive artistic style. After initial dismissals, Judge William Orrick issued a significant ruling on 12th August 2024, allowing direct copyright infringement and inducement claims to proceed while dismissing DMCA and right of publicity claims. The court found the artists had plausibly argued that Stable Diffusion was built "to a significant extent on copyrighted works" and was "created to facilitate infringement by design" through compressed copies stored in the AI model. The case moves to discovery with trial set for 8th September 2026, potentially establishing transformative precedent for AI-generated art regulation. The litigation challenges whether AI-generated works "in the style of" existing artists constitute copyright infringement, raising fundamental questions about whether compressed training data storage violates reproduction rights and whether AI outputs are infringing derivative works.

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.