Published
July 1, 2026
Updated
July 17, 2026
OpenAI and ChatGPT are named in litigation spanning copyright, consumer privacy, and product-liability claims. This page tracks the major cases, what each one alleges, and where it stands.
Allegations Only · No Class Certified in Any Case Below
This article describes several pending lawsuits and complaints against OpenAI, Microsoft, and Sam Altman. The statements below are unproven allegations from court filings. None of the defendants has been found liable in any of these cases, no class has been certified, and there is nothing to claim in any of them. This page is informational and is not legal advice.
What Is This About?
OpenAI and its ChatGPT product are named as a defendant in several unrelated pieces of litigation moving through U.S. and Canadian courts in 2026 — copyright suits from a major newspaper, a group of authors, and a coalition of nearly 400 local newspapers, a consumer privacy class action over ChatGPT's tracking code, and an individual injury lawsuit tied to last year's Florida State University shooting.This page tracks the major OpenAI and ChatGPT cases making news: what each one alleges, who brought it, and where it currently stands.
Status
Multiple Cases Pending
Last checked July 17, 2026 · NYT sanctions motion pending
Cases Tracked
8 lawsuits and disputes
Copyright, privacy, and injury litigation across U.S. and Canadian courts
Can I Claim Anything?
No — nothing to claim yet
None of the cases below has reached a settlement
The New York Times' Copyright Lawsuit Against OpenAI and Microsoft
The New York Times Company sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December 2023, alleging the companies used millions of the paper's articles without permission to train ChatGPT and other AI systems, and that Microsoft's computing infrastructure helped make that training possible. The Times also alleges Microsoft engaged in "contributory" infringement for supplying the computing power OpenAI used to build its models. The Times brings the case on its own behalf as the sole plaintiff, seeking to recover for its own copyrighted work, rather than as a proposed class action.The Times amended the case on June 25, 2026, dropping its contributory-infringement claim against OpenAI (along with its trademark claims) and concentrating its secondary-liability theory on Microsoft. According to the amended complaint, that recast was prompted by a March 25, 2026 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Cox Communications, Inc. v. Sony Music Entertainment, in which the Court unanimously raised the bar for contributory copyright infringement — holding that merely knowing about infringement while continuing to supply a standard service is not enough, and that a provider must instead intend its service to be used to infringe. To try to meet that stricter standard, the amended complaint alleges Microsoft did more than host OpenAI's models: it claims Microsoft built an "unusually complex," custom supercomputing system — the complaint cites figures such as more than 285,000 CPU cores and 10,000 GPUs — designed to enable large-scale training on copyrighted material.
A Times spokesperson said the changes streamline "the case to its most potent arguments" while its "core claims remain the same." OpenAI has said its models are "grounded in fair use," and Microsoft has dismissed the amended complaint as a "last-ditch effort" to save the contributory claims, maintaining that its cloud services are neutral infrastructure. The case is coordinated for pretrial proceedings with the consolidated author copyright cases described below, before U.S. District Judge Sidney H. Stein in the Southern District of New York.
OpenAI Accused of Hiding and Deleting Evidence — the July 2026 Sanctions Motion
On July 9, 2026, a group of news publishers led by The New York Times — joined by the New York Daily News, the Center for Investigative Reporting, The Intercept, and Ziff Davis — filed a motion asking the court to sanction OpenAI over its conduct in discovery. The publishers allege that for more than two years OpenAI told the court it was technically unable to search its training data and ChatGPT output logs for their copyrighted articles, even though — the motion contends — OpenAI had already built tools to run exactly those searches and had in fact searched for the publishers' content before the lawsuits were filed. The publishers also allege OpenAI deleted or compressed billions of ChatGPT conversations, making them unsearchable, despite a court order to preserve that data.The motion asks the court to, among other things, bar OpenAI from relying at trial on a 20-million-conversation sample the publishers call unusable, enter a finding that OpenAI's logs would have shown substantial and systematic reproduction of the publishers' articles, instruct the jury that OpenAI destroyed evidence, and order OpenAI to pay the publishers' attorneys' fees. These are contested allegations in a pending motion — the court has not ruled on them, and OpenAI has not been found to have done anything wrong.
OpenAI denies the accusations. A company spokesperson, Drew Pusateri, said the publishers are pushing for private user conversations as their underlying case weakens, and framed the demand as an attempt to invade the privacy of ChatGPT users who "have nothing to do with this case." OpenAI has separately argued that handing over large volumes of user chats — which can contain sensitive personal information — creates privacy risks, and that examples of ChatGPT reproducing article text reflect atypical, manipulated prompts rather than ordinary use.
The Consolidated Author Copyright Class Actions
A separate group of cases — captioned Tremblay v. OpenAI, Silverman v. OpenAI, and Chabon v. OpenAI, together with a related Authors Guild suit — allege OpenAI copied and used copyrighted books to train its models without permission or payment. Unlike The Times' suit, these are proposed class actions brought on behalf of authors whose books were allegedly used, not yet certified or settled. They are now coordinated as In re: OpenAI, Inc., Copyright Infringement Litigation before Judge Stein in the Southern District of New York. In October 2025, Judge Stein denied OpenAI's motion to dismiss the consolidated plaintiffs' core infringement claim, allowing the litigation to continue.That theory is not hypothetical. In September 2025, OpenAI's rival Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a nearly identical author copyright class action, after a judge found it had illegally downloaded and stored millions of copyrighted books — without admitting wrongdoing. Readers can see how that settlement played out on OCA's Anthropic $1.5 billion copyright settlement page. OpenAI has not reached any comparable settlement.
Nearly 400 Local Newspapers Sue OpenAI and Microsoft
On June 24, 2026, a coalition of nearly 400 local and regional newspapers filed their own copyright suit against OpenAI and Microsoft in the Southern District of New York. Led by the Long Island-based publisher Richner Communications and represented by Matthew J. Platkin, the former Attorney General of New Jersey, the case — captioned Richner Communications, Inc. v. Microsoft Corporation and OpenAI, No. 1:26-cv-05320 — is among the largest coordinated copyright actions brought by the local press.The complaint alleges OpenAI and Microsoft scraped the publishers' websites — including paywalled articles — copied the stories onto their servers, and used them to train ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot without permission or payment. It adds a distinct technical claim: that the companies used automated extraction tools to strip out author bylines, publication names, and copyright notices before training, which the publishers say violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's ban on removing copyright-management information (17 U.S.C. § 1202). The publishers seek statutory damages and an order requiring their works to be removed from the defendants' models and training data. Like the other cases here, it is a newly filed complaint; nothing has been proven and no judgment has been entered.
A Copyright Class Action Against OpenAI in Canada
A proposed class action was also filed against OpenAI in British Columbia, Canada, on behalf of Canadian authors, employers of authors, and their assignees or licensees whose copyrighted works were allegedly used in OpenAI's training data without consent. Filed by the law firm Siskinds in September 2024, the case is in its early stages, and OpenAI has moved to have it struck or dismissed for lack of jurisdiction in Canada. It has no bearing on U.S. residents.The ChatGPT Privacy Class Action Over Meta and Google Tracking
Lim v. OpenAI Global, LLC, filed in the Northern District of California on May 5, 2026, was a proposed class action alleging OpenAI embedded Meta Pixel and Google Analytics tracking code into ChatGPT.com, allowing Meta and Google to receive users' query content along with identifying cookies without consent. The proposed class covered anyone who entered a query into ChatGPT while the alleged tracking code was active.The case did not last long: the plaintiff voluntarily dismissed it without prejudice on May 13, 2026, just eight days after filing, and the court terminated the case on May 15, 2026. A voluntary dismissal without prejudice ends the case for now but does not decide the allegations on their merits and does not, by itself, prevent the same claims from being refiled later. See OCA's full write-up of the Lim v. OpenAI complaint for what it alleged in detail, including the complaint itself.
The underlying theory is still alive elsewhere. A closely comparable claim — that an AI chatbot's website secretly forwarded chat transcripts to Meta and Google — is currently being litigated against a different company in OCA's Perplexity AI chat privacy class action. Readers who want background on the wiretap statute both cases rely on can see OCA's CIPA glossary explainer.
The FSU Shooting Lawsuit Against Sam Altman and OpenAI
A lawsuit filed in Leon County, Florida circuit court alleges OpenAI rushed ChatGPT to market — one day ahead of a competing product from Google, according to the complaint — and that the rush affected the product's safety guardrails. The suit was brought by a survivor of the April 2025 shooting at Florida State University, who alleges she was shot and seriously injured by a gunman who had extensively used ChatGPT, including in the period leading up to the shooting. The plaintiff sued Sam Altman personally, in addition to OpenAI, alleging he directed decisions that affected the product's safety testing. Unlike the cases above, this is an individual product-liability and negligence lawsuit brought by one plaintiff on her own behalf, not a proposed class action.The man charged in the shooting has pleaded not guilty and faces a pending criminal trial; nothing in this civil complaint has been proven, and OpenAI has said ChatGPT "is not responsible for this terrible crime" and that it proactively shared information about the account in question with law enforcement after the shooting.
Apple's Trade Secret Lawsuit Against OpenAI
In a separate dispute, Apple sued OpenAI, its Chief Hardware Officer Tang Tan, a former Apple engineer, and OpenAI's hardware unit io Products in the Northern District of California on July 10, 2026, alleging they misappropriated Apple's hardware trade secrets and breached the confidentiality agreements former Apple employees had signed. This is a corporate trade secret and breach-of-contract case, not a class action, so there is nothing for consumers to claim. See our full write-up on Apple's trade secret lawsuit against OpenAI. The allegations are unproven, and OpenAI has not been found liable.Elon Musk's Lawsuit Against Sam Altman and OpenAI
Separately, OpenAI co-founder Elon Musk sued Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and OpenAI, alleging they abandoned the company's founding promise to build AI as an open, nonprofit effort. On May 18, 2026, a federal advisory jury sided with OpenAI, finding Musk's fraud and contract claims were barred by the statute of limitations; Musk has said he will appeal, and separate antitrust claims remain. This is a founder-versus-company dispute, not a consumer class action, so there is nothing to claim. See our full write-up on Musk v. Altman and the OpenAI verdict.What Happens Next
None of the cases above has reached a settlement, so there is no claim form to file and no deadline to track for consumers right now. The consolidated author copyright cases in the Southern District of New York are the ones most likely to eventually produce a class settlement, given that a nearly identical claim against Anthropic already has. If any OpenAI or ChatGPT case reaches a settlement or a certified class, OCA will publish a dedicated settlement page with the claim details.Free settlement alerts
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Frequently Asked Questions
What lawsuits and class actions is OpenAI facing in 2026?
OpenAI and ChatGPT are named in several unrelated pieces of litigation: The New York Times' copyright suit against OpenAI and Microsoft, consolidated author copyright class actions coordinated in the Southern District of New York, a copyright suit by a coalition of nearly 400 local newspapers led by Richner Communications, a copyright class action filed in British Columbia, Canada, a ChatGPT privacy class action over Meta and Google tracking code, and an individual injury lawsuit tied to the 2025 Florida State University shooting.
Why is The New York Times asking the court to sanction OpenAI?
In a motion filed July 9, 2026, The New York Times and other publishers (including the New York Daily News, the Center for Investigative Reporting, The Intercept, and Ziff Davis) allege OpenAI obstructed discovery — telling the court for years that it could not search its training data and ChatGPT logs for their articles when, the motion says, it could and had, and deleting billions of ChatGPT conversations despite a preservation order. They ask the court to penalize OpenAI, including by instructing a jury that evidence was destroyed. OpenAI denies wrongdoing and says the publishers are seeking private user data as their case weakens. The court has not ruled on the motion, and these are unproven allegations.
What is the ChatGPT privacy class action about?
Lim v. OpenAI Global, LLC, filed in the Northern District of California in May 2026, alleged OpenAI embedded Meta Pixel and Google Analytics tracking code into ChatGPT.com, letting Meta and Google receive users' query content and identifying cookies without consent. The named plaintiff voluntarily dismissed the case eight days after filing.
Has a copyright class action against an AI company already settled?
Yes, but not against OpenAI. In September 2025, OpenAI's rival Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a nearly identical author copyright class action, without admitting wrongdoing. OpenAI's own consolidated author copyright cases are still being litigated and have not settled.
Is The New York Times' lawsuit against OpenAI a class action?
No. The Times sues in its own right as a single corporate plaintiff seeking to recover for its own copyrighted articles, rather than on behalf of a class.
Can I file a claim in a class action against OpenAI right now?
No. None of the OpenAI-related cases tracked on this page has reached a settlement or produced a claim form. This page will be updated if any of them does.
Sources
• The New York Times — reporting on the June 25, 2026 amended complaint• The New York Times Company v. Microsoft Corporation, et al., No. 1:23-cv-11195 (S.D.N.Y.) — docket via CourtListener
• Bloomberg Law — reporting on the July 9, 2026 publishers' sanctions motion
• Cox Communications, Inc. v. Sony Music Entertainment, 607 U.S. ___ (2026) — opinion via Supreme Court of the United States
• Richner Communications, Inc. v. Microsoft Corporation and OpenAI, No. 1:26-cv-05320 (S.D.N.Y., filed June 24, 2026) — reporting via Courthouse News Service
• In re: OpenAI, Inc., Copyright Infringement Litigation, No. 1:25-md-03143 (S.D.N.Y.) — docket via CourtListener
• BakerHostetler — OpenAI ChatGPT Litigation case tracker
• Siskinds LLP — OpenAI copyright class action (British Columbia)
• Lim v. OpenAI Global, LLC, No. 3:26-cv-04063 (N.D. Cal.) — complaint and court docket; see OCA's full case write-up
• WCTV (Gray Media) — reporting on the FSU shooting lawsuit
About This Page
This article summarizes several pending, unrelated lawsuits involving OpenAI, Microsoft, and Sam Altman. The statements attributed to each complaint are allegations only; none of the defendants has been found liable in any case described here, no class has been certified in any of them, and there is no settlement or claim form for consumers in any of them. OpenClassActions.com is a consumer news and information site and is not a law firm or a party to any of these cases. This page is general information, not legal advice.
For more class actions keep scrolling below.
Status
Amended Complaint Filed — Sanctions Motion Pending
Case Title
The New York Times Company v. Microsoft Corporation, OpenAI, Inc., et al.
Case Number
1:23-cv-11195
Court
U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York
Date Filed
December 27, 2023
Amended June 25, 2026
Court Docket
NYT v. Microsoft Docket — CourtListener
