OpenAI accuses plaintiffs' firm of buying its own evidence
The disputed research, a market-dilution study co-authored by copyright scholar Jane Ginsburg, is now accused of being commissioned by the very lawyers who used it.
Strip away the procedural noise and here's the plain version: OpenAI says Susman Godfrey paid for a study, hid that it paid for it, then slipped it into the case as if it were independent evidence — evidence aimed at exactly the "market dilution" gap Judge Chhabria flagged as the plaintiffs' weak spot. If true, that's not a paperwork slip, that's the kind of thing that can blow up a case's credibility, not just one exhibit. Authors watching the AI-copyright fights for signs of where the money and precedent might land should treat this as a real setback for the plaintiffs' side, not a technicality to skim past.
Why it matters to you: The dilution argument was the one path Chhabria left open for authors to win an AI-copyright case, and this filing accuses the plaintiffs' own lawyers of manufacturing the evidence for it.
This story ran in the Coral Wire edition of Sun, Sep 27 2026, when the Coral Index stood at 55/100 (Mixed signals).
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