Substantive AI law courts cite

2026-08-25 · U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit

The Seventh Circuit addresses criminal charges alleging use of Stable Diffusion to create CSAM-like images. It analyzes how federal child-exploitation statutes apply to AI-generated depictions and reverses dismissal of key counts, making the opinion important for AI criminal-law doctrine.

Steven Anderegg is charged with pro- ducing, distributing, and possessing visual depictions of mi- nors engaged in sexually explicit conduct and transferring such material to a minor under the age of sixteen. According to the government, Anderegg produced these images using Stable Diffusion, a generative artificial intelligence (“GenAI”) software that allowed him to create hyper-realistic …

2025-06-25 · U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California · 788 F. Supp. 3d 1026

The Northern District of California grants Meta partial summary judgment on fair use for copying authors’ books to train Llama. The order stresses generative AI’s potential market harms while finding the plaintiffs’ record inadequate to defeat fair use in this case.

Companies are presently racing to develop generative artificial intelligence models— software products that are capable of generating text, images, videos, or sound based on materials they’ve previously been “trained” on. Because the performance of a generative AI model depends on the amount and quality of data it absorbs as part of its training, companies have …

2025-06-23 · U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California

The Northern District of California rules on Anthropic’s book copying for Claude and related language models. Judge Alsup distinguishes training from maintaining a central library, finding transformative fair use for training while allowing claims about pirated library retention to proceed.

An artificial intelligence firm downloaded for free millions of copyrighted books in 17 digital form from pirate sites on the internet. The firm also purchased copyrighted books 18 (some overlapping with those acquired from the pirate sites), tore off the bindings, scanned 19 every page, and stored them in digitized, searchable files. All the foregoing …

2025-03-18 · U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit

The D.C. Circuit holds that the Copyright Act requires human authorship and affirms the Copyright Office’s refusal to register a work listing Thaler’s Creativity Machine as sole author. The opinion frames AI authorship as a statutory question.

This case presents a question made salient by recent advances in artificial intelligence: Can a non-human machine be an author under the Copyright Act of 1976? The use of artificial intelligence to produce original work is rapidly increasing across industries and creative fields. Who—or what—is the “author” of such work is a question that implicates …

2025-02-11 · U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware · 765 F. Supp. 3d 382

The District of Delaware treats ROSS’s use of Westlaw headnotes as nontransformative AI training for a competing legal-research tool. The opinion grants partial summary judgment for Thomson Reuters and becomes a central legal-AI copyright ruling on appeal.

Ross’s use is not transformative because it does not have a “further purpose or different character” from Thomson Reuters’s. Id. at 529. Ross was using Thomson Reuters’s headnotes as AI data to create a legal research tool to compete with Westlaw. It is undisputed that Ross’s AI is not generative AI (AI that writes new …