AI Incident Database

Stability AI filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in January 2025 after mounting legal costs from multiple copyright lawsuits over its Stable Diffusion training practices exceeded company resources, disrupting open-source AI image generation ecosystem.

Perplexity AI faced accusations from Forbes and other publishers for scraping protected content, bypassing robots.txt restrictions, and generating fabricated source citations while providing inadequate attribution to original creators.

The RIAA and major record labels sued AI music companies Suno and Udio in 2024, alleging their generative models were trained on copyrighted music without permission and can reproduce existing songs.

Scarlett Johansson accused OpenAI of copying her voice for GPT-4o's 'Sky' assistant without permission, leading to legal threats and OpenAI pausing the voice feature.

OpenAI reportedly used its Whisper tool to transcribe YouTube videos for GPT training data without creator permission, potentially violating copyright and platform terms of service.

OpenAI's GPT Store launched in January 2024 with numerous problematic custom GPTs that facilitated academic dishonesty and copyright infringement. Investigations revealed inadequate content moderation and policy enforcement during the initial rollout.

The New York Times filed a landmark federal lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft in December 2023, alleging copyright infringement for using millions of NYT articles to train GPT models without permission, potentially setting precedent for AI training data rights.

The Authors Guild and 17 prominent authors sued OpenAI in September 2023, alleging ChatGPT was trained on their copyrighted books without permission. The class action lawsuit seeks damages and injunctive relief, raising fundamental questions about fair use in AI training.

In 2023, Amazon's Kindle marketplace was flooded with AI-generated books falsely attributed to real authors like Jane Friedman. The platform's lack of verification enabled mass identity theft affecting hundreds of legitimate authors.

Comedian Sarah Silverman and authors sued Meta and OpenAI in July 2023, alleging their AI models were trained on pirated copies of their copyrighted books from Library Genesis without permission.

AI-generated song mimicking Drake and The Weeknd voices gained 15+ million plays across platforms before Universal Music Group secured removal. Sparked industry-wide concerns about AI voice cloning and unauthorized use of artist likenesses.

Getty Images filed lawsuits against Stability AI alleging Stable Diffusion was trained on millions of copyrighted images without permission, seeking billions in damages and setting major precedent for AI training data rights.

Getty Images and multiple artists filed lawsuits against Stability AI alleging the company trained Stable Diffusion on billions of copyrighted images without permission, seeking damages and injunctive relief.

DeviantArt launched DreamUp AI tool using Stable Diffusion trained on artist works without consent, sparking massive community backlash and demands for opt-out mechanisms from affected creators.

GitHub Copilot reproduced copyrighted code verbatim from its training data, leading to a class action lawsuit alleging widespread copyright infringement and violation of open-source licenses.

GitHub Copilot was found to reproduce copyrighted code verbatim from its training data, leading to a class action lawsuit alleging copyright infringement by the AI coding assistant.

NightCafe and similar AI art platforms generated commercial artworks that closely replicated copyrighted styles and specific pieces, sparking widespread artist protests and ongoing legal challenges over training data usage.

Stable Diffusion generated images containing distorted Getty Images watermarks, revealing the model was trained on copyrighted Getty content without permission. This discovery became key evidence in Getty's copyright infringement lawsuit against Stability AI.