A US federal judge has rejected OpenAI’s request to dismiss a lawsuit filed by several well-known authors who allege that text generated by the company’s artificial intelligence chatbot, ChatGPT, infringes on their copyrighted works.
US District Judge Sidney Stein, in a ruling on Monday, said the authors may be able to prove that ChatGPT’s outputs are “similar enough” to their copyrighted books to constitute infringement.
The lawsuit, filed in the Southern District of New York, is part of a growing wave of legal challenges against AI developers accused of misusing copyrighted material. The case has been brought by a group of authors including Ta-Nehisi Coates, John Grisham, George R.R. Martin and comedian Sarah Silverman.
Judge Stein said a ChatGPT-generated summary of Martin’s A Game of Thrones “conveys the overall tone and feel of the original work by parroting the plot, characters and themes,” rejecting OpenAI’s argument that no reasonable jury could find the chatbot’s output similar enough to constitute infringement.
The court, however, did not rule on the broader allegation that OpenAI unlawfully used the authors’ works to train its large language models. OpenAI, backed by Microsoft, has argued that such use falls under the “fair use” provision of US copyright law.
The case is among several filed against AI firms such as Microsoft, Meta Platforms and Anthropic. In August, Anthropic agreed to pay USD 1.5 billion to settle a class action suit over similar claims.
OpenAI and its legal representatives did not immediately respond to requests for comment, while the authors’ counsel, Justin Nelson of Susman Godfrey, also declined to comment, as per Associated Press.
The case is titled In re OpenAI Copyright Litigation, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, No. 1:25-md-03143.