OpenAI copyright case draws 51 amicus briefs as fair-use fight widens

Fifty-one briefs and a 6 November deadline

The court received 51 amicus briefs by the 30 October deadline.

A fair-use ruling will set licensing costs for media used in AI training and shape what models may output. The 51 briefs split 26 for the plaintiffs, 18 for the defendants and eight neutral, so Judge Sidney H. Stein is not getting a consensus. No oral argument date has been set. A final round of briefs is due on 6 November. The case consolidates more than a dozen AI lawsuits, including actions filed by the Authors Guild and the New York Times. Amicus briefs let nonparties put their view to the court.

This docket drew publisher and author associations, individual creators and journalists, copyright scholars, tech groups and some U.S. legislators. The U.S. Department of Justice filed a Statement of Interest on 4 September urging the court to find that training AI on copyrighted works is fair use.

The arguments before Judge Stein

In cross-motions for summary judgment filed last month, the plaintiffs argue that OpenAI infringed by copying works to train its models, including from pirated sources. They also argue that its outputs can infringe. OpenAI's attorneys counter that copying for training qualifies as fair use, and that the outputs do not infringe.

Judge Stein has already narrowed the record once.

In October he struck a study suggesting AI books were displacing human-written works. OpenAI said its author failed to disclose a funding conflict. The author denies it, and the plaintiffs did not oppose the motion.

Music rights holders add claims

Anthropic and Suno face claims over 274 Elvis songs, 853 Reservoir songs and more than 1,000 additional tracks. The plaintiffs accuse the companies of scraping hundreds of songs without licenses. Plaintiffs include Elvis Presley's estate, Reservoir Media and Round Hill. Statutory damages sought total $41.1 million for the Presley estate, $151.4 million against Anthropic and $186.4 million against Suno. The Presley suit was filed on 23 October 2026 over 274 compositions. Both companies assert a fair-use defense and say they will defend the cases vigorously.

Outputs are the next front

The Guardian reported on 28 October that Anthropic's Claude can now decompile video game code overnight, turning a job that took months into an evening's work. Its reporter asked Claude to build a mashup in a browser. Four minutes later it produced a playable, if poor, game, and suggested hosting it locally to avoid copyright issues.

The best of these mashups still needed significant human tweaking, the paper said. The same piece reported that PS5 emulation has made an enormous jump, so that almost any PS5 game now runs on a PC. It added that much of this is extremely illegal.

That is the output side of the argument. It is harder to police than a training corpus.

What happens next

Final briefs in the OpenAI case are due on 6 November. Oral arguments will be set before Judge Stein after that filing, and no date has been announced.

SaaSrise argued that a ruling against fair use would force AI companies to build legal review, provenance tracking and licensing verification into their data pipelines. Anthropic and Suno say they will fight their music cases vigorously.