Authors Guild Seeks Summary Judgment Against OpenAI

The Authors Guild and a group of prominent authors have asked a federal judge to rule in their favor without a trial in a major copyright lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft. The motion, filed on September 5, claims the artificial intelligence company's use of copyrighted books to train its large language models is an existential threat to the writing profession.

According to the filing from the Authors Guild and its co-plaintiffs, OpenAI and its primary shareholder, Microsoft, committed copyright infringement by using fiction writers' work to train its generative pre-trained transformer, or GPT. The plaintiffs argue this activity threatens the incentives to create, the livelihoods of authors, and the future of book publishing. The discovery process has been so sensitive that the court has sealed many letters and exhibits, and the Authors Guild's own filing is heavily redacted to hide proprietary details about the number of books affected.

The Plaintiffs' Case for 'Mass Piracy'

The plaintiffs maintain that OpenAI built the foundations of its business on mass piracy. This allegedly included reproducing and then deleting book content found on the pirate site Library Genesis, also known as LibGen. They note that courts have consistently held that obtaining for free something one would ordinarily have to buy is not fair use. The authors argue that books comprise high-quality data because they contain organized writing and structured thoughts that enable large language models to convincingly mimic human storytelling.

As evidence of harm, they cite increasing sales of AI-generated fiction on platforms such as Kindle e-readers. They also reference a viral 2025 tweet from OpenAI machine-learning technician Tarun Gogineni, who suggested that if Song of Ice and Fire series author George R.R. Martin dies early, GPT-5 will autocomplete his series. The class action's lead co-plaintiffs include authors David Baldacci, Taylor Branch, Michael Connelly, Sylvia Day, Jonathan Franzen, Christopher Golden, Andrew Sean Greer, John Grisham, David Henry Hwang, George R.R. Martin, Jodi Picoult, Stacy Schiff, and James Shapiro.

OpenAI's Fair Use Defense

OpenAI and Microsoft filed their own motion for summary judgment on September 4. The defendants maintain the alleged use was fair because it was highly major of the data fed into its models. They argue that training a useful large language model requires hundreds of billions to tens of trillions of words from a multitude of diverse sources, which are mined for general linguistic patterns and not to replicate creative expression.

The defendants state that the ChatGPT interface does not display copies of books and that its content is no different from commonplace excerpts or summaries available for free online. They claim ChatGPT has an alleged regurgitation rate of 0.00007%, meaning it rarely produces word-for-word sequences outside of idioms or public-domain texts. An OpenAI expert's analysis is cited, which found the longest span of contiguous text generated from a plaintiff's book was a 1,899-word excerpt from George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones.

The defendants assert that competitive harm from new, non-infringing works is not harm that copyright protects against. They believe their position resembles successful fair use arguments in prior cases like 2015's Authors Guild v. Google Inc. And 2025's Kadrey v. Meta Platforms.

A Clash Over Transformation and Market Harm

The plaintiffs counter that the copying in this case was nontransformative, unlike in the Google Books or Kadrey cases. They allege the secretive copying was done for the purpose of developing a competing commercial product, denying authors and publishers any opportunity to earn revenue from AI training licenses. For the plaintiffs, OpenAI's reproduction of creative work was not justified, and the resulting technology threatens the market for human-authored books.

The case, now consolidated with others under the docket In Re: Open AI Inc. Copyright Infringement Litigation (1:25-md-03143), is being heard in the Southern District of New York by U.S. District Court Judge Sidney Stein. Opposition briefs are due in early October, with reply briefs due in early November.