AI in Court
Hallucinated cases, copyright wars, and the first AI laws
Generative AI arrived faster than any law written for it. So the rules are being made the hard way: sanction by sanction, ruling by ruling, statute by statute. This trail follows the cases that are deciding who is liable when a model makes things up, who owns what a model makes, and whether the training itself was legal - every stop tied to the actual filing or ruling.
-
Lawyers sanctioned for filing ChatGPT's made-up cases
Two New York lawyers submitted a legal brief full of court cases that ChatGPT invented, stood by them when challenged, and were sanctioned by a federal judge.
The opening scene of AI's legal era: a fluent model invents convincing case law, and two lawyers file it. The sanction is small; the precedent about verifying AI output is permanent.
-
Air Canada is held liable for its chatbot's invented policy
A 2024 tribunal ruled Air Canada had to honor a bereavement-fare policy its website chatbot made up, rejecting its claim that the chatbot was a separate party.
Next question: when a company's chatbot makes something up, who pays? A tribunal's answer - the company - quietly sets the liability baseline for every customer-facing bot.
-
Copyright Office limits registration of an AI-illustrated comic
In February 2023 the US Copyright Office ruled that Midjourney images in the comic Zarya of the Dawn were not protected by copyright.
Then authorship: the US Copyright Office draws its line at a comic book, protecting the human-written story but not the Midjourney images inside it.
-
The Supreme Court declined to hear the AI-authorship case Thaler v. Perlmutter
On March 2, 2026 the Supreme Court denied certiorari in Thaler v. Perlmutter, leaving the ruling that AI-made work with no human author cannot be copyrighted.
Stephen Thaler pushed the purest version of the question - can a machine be an author at all? Every court said no, and the Supreme Court declined to revisit it.
-
The New York Times Sues OpenAI and Microsoft
On December 27, 2023, The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright over its articles used in AI training, putting training data before the courts.
The biggest fight is about the input, not the output: the Times suit puts the legality of training on copyrighted text squarely before the courts.
-
Record labels sue AI music generators Suno and Udio
In June 2024 the major record labels, via the RIAA, sued AI music services Suno and Udio for copying sound recordings to train their models.
The music industry follows with the same theory aimed at sound recordings - notable because the labels coordinated through the RIAA, the same body that fought Napster.
-
Andersen v Stability AI: artists' copyright class action clears a key hurdle
In August 2024 a US judge let artists' core copyright claims against Stability AI and other image generators proceed past dismissal.
Visual artists get their day too: the class action against image generators survives dismissal, which means discovery into how training data was actually gathered.
-
Bartz v. Anthropic: the first AI-training fair-use ruling and a $1.5B settlement
A federal judge ruled in June 2025 that AI training on lawful books is fair use but a pirated-book library is not; a 1.5 billion dollar settlement followed.
The first real answer arrives split down the middle: training on lawfully obtained books is fair use, hoarding pirated copies is not - and the settlement is record-setting.
-
Getty Images v Stability AI: the UK High Court's first AI-training copyright trial
In November 2025 the UK High Court largely rejected Getty's copyright case against Stability AI after Getty dropped its main training claims.
The UK reaches the question first at full trial and mostly dismisses it - a reminder that this war is being fought jurisdiction by jurisdiction, with different outcomes.
-
The EU Adopts the AI Act (2024)
The European Union adopts Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, the world's first comprehensive law governing artificial intelligence through a risk-based framework.
While courts work case by case, Europe legislates wholesale: the first comprehensive AI law sorts systems by risk and sets the regulatory template others copy or reject.