Authors Guild v. OpenAI Inc.

On 3 April 2025, Authors Guild 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.

The Authors Guild v. OpenAI is a major copyright infringement action brought by The Authors Guild and a group of bestselling fiction authors, including George R.R. Martin, John Grisham, Jonathan Franzen, Michael Connelly, Jodi Picoult, Sylvia Day, David Baldacci, Mary Bly, and others. The plaintiffs allege that OpenAI and Microsoft copied and used thousands of copyrighted works of fiction without authorisation to train large language models such as ChatGPT.

The complaint claims that OpenAI ingested complete literary works from datasets including Books1, Books2, Common Crawl, WebText2, and Wikipedia, enabling ChatGPT to reproduce detailed summaries, outlines, and derivative stories based on the plaintiffs’ books. The Authors Guild also asserts ownership of classic mystery works by Mignon Eberhart, which ChatGPT has been shown to summarise and extend.

The plaintiffs allege willful copyright infringement under the Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. § 501) and seek damages for lost licensing opportunities, market substitution, and a permanent injunction to prevent further unauthorised use.

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.