Authors Guild asks court to rule OpenAI and Microsoft infringed copyrights in training GPT models

What happened

On 4 September 2026, the Authors Guild and the class plaintiffs (David Baldacci, Michael Connelly, Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham, George R.R. Martin, Jodi Picoult and others) filed a motion for summary judgment before Judge Sidney H. Stein (S.D.N.Y.) in the books track of the consolidated OpenAI litigation (MDL 25-md-3143), asking the court to rule that OpenAI and Microsoft infringed their copyrights by training GPT models on books allegedly pirated from LibGen and traded between the companies, and to reject the fair-use defense. The Guild's announcement quotes the brief's evidence at length — including the "Gogineni research mission" into the last two books of Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire — and the defendants' counter-statistics (8.2 million Copilot conversations yielding 24 with 30-word-or-longer matches). The defendants cross-moved for summary judgment the same day. Opposition briefs are due in early October, replies in early November.

Why it may matter to you

The first summary-judgment motion in the flagship author class action against OpenAI — the fair-use ruling here will set the terms for the books cases.

What is not yet known

The outcome; how the court weighs the competing memorization statistics.