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Sam Altman vs. The Creative Community

OpenAI just won the ability to consolidate dozens of lawsuits into a single case, but the judge overseeing it isn’t exactly sympathetic to its plight. Meanwhile, Meta and Anthropic are fighting their own court battles over training A.I.s with unlicensed data. Insiders wonder if Congress will step in to broker a compromise—or if creators are destined for a less satisfying conclusion.

Sam Altman
OpenAI had lobbied for California—preferably San Francisco, a jurisdiction more attuned to the needs of the tech set: Instead, the panel tapped U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein of New York. Photo: Joel Saget/AFP/Getty Images
Eriq Gardner
April 8, 2025

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You win some, you lose some, and then there are the occasions when the scorecard isn’t entirely legible. To wit: On April 3, creators suing OpenAI for allegedly committing copyright infringement on a grand, epoch-defining scale received word that all litigation against the company would be consolidated. OpenAI, for its part, had warned that the very future of artificial intelligence hung in the balance—and that conflicting rulings from courts across the nation would only sow chaos. After hearing arguments in North Carolina, a judicial panel agreed to Sam Altman’s company’s call for centralization. From here on out, a single federal judge will oversee discovery, class certification, and the question of whether cases are ripe for trial. This includes a class action seeking to represent anyone in Hollywood and beyond who has ever uploaded a video to YouTube only to find their work transcribed and then used as training data.