Chabon v. OpenAI, Inc.

On 11 April 2025, Chabon 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.

Chabon v. OpenAI is a class action filed on 8 September 2023 by authors Michael Chabon, David Henry Hwang, Matthew Klam, Rachel Louise Snyder, and Ayelet Waldman, alleging that OpenAI copied their copyrighted works without consent to train its GPT models, including GPT-3 and GPT-4. The plaintiffs claim that OpenAI scraped books, plays, and articles from the internet, incorporating them into training datasets such as BookCorpus, Books1, and Books2. These datasets allegedly included copyrighted works obtained from pirated “shadow libraries” such as LibGen, Z-Library, and Sci-Hub.

The complaint asserts that ChatGPT can produce accurate summaries and analyses of the plaintiffs’ works—such as The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and The Dance and the Railroad—demonstrating the inclusion of their texts in OpenAI’s datasets.

The suit brings six causes of action: direct and vicarious copyright infringement, DMCA violations, unfair competition, negligence, and unjust enrichment, seeking damages and injunctive relief for large-scale unauthorised copying.

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.