Every Copyright Lawsuit Against an AI Company, Mapped — via ChatGPTiseatingtheworld.com
Eighty-seven cases. Six federal districts. One visual that tells you exactly where the law is being made — and what it means if you're a designer whose work might be in someone's training set.
By Brooke
I keep this map open in a tab.
Not because I need to track every case. I don't. But because there's something clarifying about seeing it all at once — the sheer volume of litigation that has accumulated since 2022, plotted across the country like a weather system. Eighty-seven cases as of March 5, 2026. The number will be higher by the time you read this.
The map was made by ChatGPTiseatingtheworld.com and shared under a Creative Commons license. I'm embedding it here with attribution because every independent designer working with AI tools — or whose work has been scraped without permission — should know what the legal landscape actually looks like right now.
What the map shows
The heaviest dockets are in the Northern District of California and the Southern District of New York. That's not surprising. Those are where the tech companies are headquartered and where the publishers and entertainment companies have their lawyers. But the spread matters. Cases are moving through Delaware, the District of Colorado, the Western District of North Carolina. A few have transferred between districts. Two appeals are already at the circuit level — the Ninth and Third Circuits — which means this is moving toward the law that will actually govern everyone.
A few cases to know by name if you're in fashion and adjacent creative industries:
Andersen v. Stability AI, Midjourney, Runway AI (ND Cal., Judge Orrick) — This is the visual artists' case. Sarah Andersen and a class of illustrators sued over image generation models trained on their work without consent or compensation. The court has significantly narrowed the claims over time. What survives tells you what copyright law will and won't protect for image creators.
Getty Images v. Stability AI (Delaware, Judge Thompson) — Getty went after Stability directly, in part over the reproduction of watermarks in generated images. If your brand has a signature visual identity — a logo, a pattern, a recognizable aesthetic — this case is the closest legal analogue to what happens when that gets absorbed into a generative model.
Concord Music v. Anthropic I & II (ND Cal.) — Two separate suits against the company that makes the AI I'm using right now. Music copyright, but the training data and output reproduction questions are identical to what visual and textile designers will eventually face.
In re OpenAI ChatGPT Litigation (ND Cal., Judge Martínez-Olguín) — The consolidated class action from writers including Tremblay, Silverman, and Chabon. The vicarious infringement claims here are structurally similar to what any designer would bring if they could show their specific designs were in the training corpus.
What it means for you
The honest answer is: we don't know yet. Most of these cases are still in the discovery and motion-to-dismiss phase. The courts haven't ruled on whether training on copyrighted work is infringement. They haven't settled what "substantial similarity" means when the output is probabilistic rather than directly copied. They haven't decided whether a style can be protected, which is the question that matters most for fashion designers.
What we do know:
The volume of litigation means the law is going to move fast in the next two to three years. Several of these cases involve circuit-level appeals, which means binding precedent is coming. If you're building a brand identity — a print, a silhouette language, a signature technique — now is the time to document it. Dates, process records, publication evidence. Copyright registration is cheap and the evidentiary value is significant if you ever need to prove priority.
The California cases are being watched most closely because California's AI-specific legislation (AB 2602, SB 1287 on digital replicas; the proposed training data transparency bills) creates a parallel statutory track that may give creators remedies even where copyright claims fail.
And if you've licensed your work to stock platforms, or posted high-resolution images of your collections publicly, your designs are almost certainly in at least one of these companies' training sets. That's not a legal conclusion — it's a probability statement. The litigation will eventually tell us whether that fact entitles you to anything.
Use the map
Zoom in. The interactive embed below lets you explore by district. Click through to the original at ChatGPTiseatingtheworld.com for case links and updates — they maintain it actively. It's the best single resource tracking this litigation in real time.
The map is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY 4.0). Attribution: ChatGPTiseatingtheworld.com, March 5, 2026.
Brooke
Covers AI law, digital IP, and emerging technology regulation for independent fashion designers. About →
Not legal advice. This is editorial analysis for informational purposes. Consult qualified legal counsel for your specific situation.