Who's Suing Who · №4
Everybody v. everybody. Every case below is on the record. Pull out, pin up, follow the writ.
Pinned to the board this issue:
- Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft — named beside OpenAI in The New York Times case
- Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google — visual-artist and AI-companion claims
- Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI — the most-sued company in AI: copyright, privacy and wrongful death
- Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic — paid $1.5bn to authors; $3bn in lyrics still pending
- Elon Musk — sued Sam Altman for $134bn, dismissed, appealing
1 · What They Read
NYT v. OpenAI & Microsoft: word-for-word reproduction; 20M anonymized logs ordered produced (aff’d J. Stein, 5 Jan ‘26). Getty v. Stability (UK): weights aren’t a copy. GEMA v. OpenAI (Munich): directly liable for lyrics.
2 · Settled, Now Licensing
Bartz authors → Anthropic, $1.5B (training fair use; the piracy wasn’t). Warner → Suno; UMG → Udio. Garcia → Character.AI & Google, confidential, Jan ‘26, plus new under-18 safety measures. Sue, then licence.
3 · Who They Reject / Hurt
Mobley v. Workday: sue the software, not just the boss — nationwide ADEA collective (MTD denied 6 Mar ‘26). Louis v. SafeRent: $2.275M + a five-year algorithm ban. Raine v. OpenAI: products-liability, live in California.
4 · The Corkboard Rep
Compute!‘s corkboard rep has requested the unsealed exhibits in this case. (The same rep filed a FOIA in Issue №2.) We’ll let you know what comes back. As ever, the rep declined to be named.
The full corkboard — threads, pins, tape and all — lives in the collectible edition of Issue №4.