US AI copyright lawsuits head for pivotal fair‑use rulings in 2026

The sprawling US copyright litigation around AI training is finally approaching the moment when judges, not just lawyers and PR teams, will define the rules of the game. 2026 is set to deliver decisions on whether scraping and ingesting vast amounts of copyrighted text, images and code can be shielded by fair use, or whether model builders must pay creators and publishers for industrial‑scale copying. OpenAI, Google and Meta are all effectively stress‑testing the same legal theory in different courts, with one or two appellate decisions likely to shape the economics of the entire sector. ([reuters.com](https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/ai-copyright-battles-enter-pivotal-year-us-courts-weigh-fair-use-2026-01-05/))

For AGI‑scale efforts, the stakes are enormous. If courts bless a broad view of fair use, the marginal cost of additional training data stays close to zero, and incumbents can keep hoovering the open web while relying on opt‑out mechanisms and selective licensing deals. If judges narrow fair use and demand compensation, training frontier models becomes more like operating a music streaming service: data pipelines will need rights clearance, usage logs and sophisticated royalty accounting. That favours deep‑pocketed players and could slow the emergence of new foundation models, but it might also stabilise the business environment by replacing open‑ended litigation risk with predictable data costs.