AI News: The Day's Highlights

July 20, 2026 · 4 min read

Perplexity

The most significant recent news in the sphere of AI copyright disputes is the final affirmation by the US Supreme Court of the principle of "human authorship only" on March 2, 2026. The court refused to hear the appeal of Stephen Thaler (case Thaler v. Perlmutter), definitively confirming that a work created solely by an algorithm without human creative input is not protected by copyright in the USA [2][4].

This decision fundamentally changes content protection strategy: now, "raw" neural network output automatically enters the public domain, and any competitor can use it freely without risk of infringement [4][11]. The key criterion for protection becomes not the fact of generation, but the presence of additional drawing, editing, or arrangement that transforms the result into a copyrightable work [3][9].

The angle of this news differs from typical reports about new lawsuits against OpenAI or Meta: this concerns a fundamental precedent that closes the possibility of registering rights to AI content in principle and shifts all responsibility to the user commercially utilizing the disputed result [3][8].

Sources:

Gemini

Google and other tech giants are facing a new wave of copyright lawsuits. On July 15, 2026, it became known that Google had been sued for allegedly using copyrighted books to train its artificial intelligence models. This lawsuit is part of a broader trend where copyright holders are challenging the use of their content for the development of AI systems.

Litigation of this nature touches upon fundamental questions about the boundaries of "fair use" of content in the United States and how AI training based on copyrighted materials should be regulated. While some courts in California have ruled in favor of tech companies, citing the "fair use" doctrine, legal uncertainty persists, and similar lawsuits continue to multiply.

These disputes have far-reaching implications for the entire AI industry, as they question business models based on free access to data for training and could affect the development of both the technologies themselves and the content market as a whole.

Sources:

Vietnam.vn
Copyright.ru

ChatGPT

On June 25, 2024, major global music labels, including Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, and Warner Records, filed lawsuits against Suno and Udio, developers of generative music AI systems. They accuse these companies of copyright infringement, claiming that their AI models used copyrighted musical works without permission for training and creating new compositions. Songs such as Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas Is You" and Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" are mentioned as examples. The labels are seeking recognition of copyright infringement and compensation for damages. (latimes.com)

Grok

On March 2, 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case of Thaler v. Perlmutter, upholding the decisions of lower courts: works created by AI without human involvement are not eligible for copyright protection. This definitively solidified the requirement of human authorship as a key condition for copyright registration in the United States.

The decision concerns the lawsuit filed by Stephen Thaler, who attempted to register an image generated by his DABUS system. The courts consistently denied his request, pointing out that authorship must belong to a human. Now, this principle has been confirmed at the highest level and is unlikely to be revisited in the near future.

Sources:

Holland & Knight (hklaw.com)
Reuters (reuters.com)
Morgan Lewis (morganlewis.com)

Claude

On July 14, 2026, publishers and authors—including Hachette, Cengage, Elsevier, author Scott Turow, and the organization S.C.R.I.B.E.—filed a class-action lawsuit against Google, accusing the tech giant of using their copyrighted works to train its AI platform Gemini without permission. The lawsuit also alleges that Google intentionally removed or altered copyright information to conceal that the Gemini models were trained on stolen materials.

This event is noteworthy not only for its scale—over 16 consolidated lawsuits against Google are already pending in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The key point is that publishers and authors have a long-standing relationship with Google through the Google Books program, where works were provided for search purposes. However, the plaintiffs claim that Google unauthorizedly trained Gemini on copies of these books, as well as on books from Google Play. This creates a legal paradox: an activity that seems straightforward in one context is classified as a violation in another.

While two early court rulings in California sided with AI companies, declaring training as "fair use," Anthropic was fined

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