AI Companies Are Starting to Win the Copyright Fight, and the Lawsuits Keep Coming Anyway

Anthropic settled a major copyright suit brought by authors, then watched a judge side with it in a separate case. Meta got an author lawsuit dismissed outright. The Guardian ran the headline "AI companies start winning the copyright fight." And yet, in the same week, BMG sued Anthropic for training on Bruno Mars and Rolling Stones lyrics without permission, Warner Bros. Discovery sued Midjourney, Encyclopedia Britannica sued Perplexity, and Asahi and Nikkei filed suit from Japan. The pattern here isn't a legal reckoning approaching its resolution — it's two separate legal economies operating in parallel, one in which AI companies are quietly building a body of favorable precedent, and another in which the plaintiffs' bar is just getting started.

Anthropically dominates the AI & Law conversation right now in a way that's almost paradoxical. The company is simultaneously the defendant that settled, the defendant that won, and — per Bloomberg — the company whose copyright licensing deal now "sets the bar" for OpenAI and Meta. It has managed to turn legal exposure into reputational positioning, framing its settlement not as capitulation but as a model for the industry. Whether that framing holds depends entirely on what the remaining cases establish about fair use, and courts are nowhere near consensus on that.

Perplexity's situation is the strangest in the field. Fortune captured it with unusual precision: the $18 billion company "wants to play nice with news publishers" and keeps getting sued anyway. The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, Reuters, and now Encyclopedia Britannica have all filed against it. The company's revenue model — summarizing content that publishers pay journalists to produce — is precisely the thing publishers cannot afford to license away, regardless of what Perplexity offers. This isn't a negotiation that's going to close. It's a structural conflict between two businesses that cannot coexist without one of them fundamentally changing.

The US Copyright Office draft on AI training is adding pressure from above, and the industry knows it. The draft is described as "sparking controversy," which in copyright policy language means that every major AI company has lawyers reading it very carefully and every rights group is treating it as validation. A Columbia Journalism Review tool tracking "lawsuit or license" outcomes across the industry suggests that the binary is real: some publishers are cutting deals, others are litigating, and few are doing both. The deals are quieter. The lawsuits generate the headlines. That asymmetry shapes the public perception of where this is heading — which skews much darker than the actual case record warrants.

The most underreported development in all of this is the geographic spread. Danish rights group Koda is suing Suno. Japanese publishers are suing Perplexity. What began as a predominantly American legal fight over training data has become an international one, and the jurisdictional complexity that creates — different fair use standards, different definitions of infringement, different remedies — is something no AI company has fully grappled with publicly. Anthropic's licensing deal sets a bar for American courts. It sets no bar in Tokyo or Copenhagen. The companies that are "winning the copyright fight" are winning it in one jurisdiction, in cases that were filed before the international wave broke.