Hollywood talent agencies, actors’ and writers’ unions and music groups have filed proposed amicus briefs backing The New York Times and the other plaintiffs suing OpenAI and Microsoft over AI training, Axios reported on Tuesday, 3 November. The briefs were filed last week in In re OpenAI, Inc. Copyright Infringement Litigation, the consolidated case before Judge Sidney H. Stein in the Southern District of New York, as the court weighs the parties’ motions for summary judgment.
By our count of the court docket, 51 proposed amicus briefs were docketed between 28 October and 2 November. 23 name the plaintiffs as the side they support, 14 name OpenAI or the defendants, 6 support neither party, and 8 name no side on the cover we read or had no copy available.
SAG-AFTRA, the American Federation of Musicians and the Writers Guild of America East and West filed one brief together. Axios quotes the unions as filing to “defend the rights and livelihoods of more than 250,000 entertainment and media workers.”
The talent agency WME filed its own brief in support of the news plaintiffs. Music groups including ASCAP and BMI filed one in support of the plaintiffs’ motions for summary judgment. News organisations filed several, including the News/Media Alliance, America’s Newspapers, Digital Content Next and a coalition of local journalism groups.
Economist Joseph Stiglitz and actor Ashley Judd filed individual briefs for the plaintiffs. So did a group of AI start-ups, among them BandLab, Boomy and Credtent, in a filing titled as a brief “of AI Startups in Support of Plaintiffs”.
A further brief was filed by The Human Consent Foundation, Creative Artists Agency, Cate Blanchett and Steven Soderbergh, among others. Axios counts it among the briefs backing the Times. Its proposed brief ends: “Amici submit the foregoing for the Court’s consideration”, and its cover names no side, so we did not count it in the 23.
Proposed amicus briefs docketed between 28 October and 2 November 2026 in In re OpenAI, Inc. Copyright Infringement Litigation, by the side each names. Our count of the CourtListener docket, one brief per filer group; 8 named no side on the cover we read or had no copy available.
Business Pill · Royalties Explained
A short explainer on royalties: paying each time you use someone else’s work. It teaches the general idea only and does not discuss this case or the briefs.
The key insight: By our count of the court docket, 51 proposed amicus briefs were filed in the OpenAI copyright case in the week to 2 November, and the ones that pick a side split 23 for the plaintiffs and 14 for OpenAI and Microsoft. What the two sides argue about is licensing: whether AI training has to pay for its data.
Who Filed for OpenAI and Microsoft
On the other side, Midjourney and Runway filed a joint brief in support of the defendants’ motions for summary judgment. So did the tech trade groups CCIA, NetChoice and TechNet; the Consumer Technology Association with library and software groups; the Electronic Frontier Foundation; Engine; and Khosla Ventures, which filed in support of OpenAI.
The briefs for the plaintiffs argue that a licensing market for AI training already exists and that skipping it causes harm. WME writes that its position “is therefore not that AI use of creative materials should be stopped, but that it should be licensed.” One of its section headings reads: “Paying for creative work will not stop AI, any more than it stopped radio or streaming”.
The unions say their members’ livelihoods “depend on downstream licensing revenues”, and one heading in their brief reads “The Public Interest Favors Licensing, Not a Categorical Exemption”. The music groups’ brief argues that “Training on Copyrighted Works Invades the Existing Market for Licensing Music as Training Data”.
Midjourney and Runway argue the opposite: “It is not possible to license the volume and diversity of content necessary to train a model capable of creating transformative works like these.” Their brief adds that at one work per minute, “licensing a million works would take a million minutes, or roughly 1.9 years”.
CCIA, NetChoice and TechNet write that the plaintiffs’ “theories of market harm—market dilution and lost fees for licensing a transformative use—misconstrue the fourth fair use factor”. Axios notes that the Justice Department has backed OpenAI’s argument on training; we covered its filing in OpenAI Copyright Litigation and the DOJ’s Statement of Interest.
Why It Matters for AI Costs
The business lever here is the cost of training data. If the court accepts that lost licensing fees count as market harm, licensing becomes a line item in what it costs to train a model. If it accepts the defendants’ view, that cost stays optional.
The split in the briefs follows that line. By our count, 23 of the 37 briefs that pick a side back the plaintiffs, about 62%. Both sides include AI companies: the plaintiff side has the AI start-ups’ brief, and the defendant side has Midjourney and Runway alongside trade groups such as CCIA, NetChoice and TechNet.
As we read the briefs, the plaintiffs’ supporters are not asking the court to stop AI training. WME says its position is that AI use of creative materials should be licensed, and the unions frame licensing as the alternative to a categorical exemption.
As we read it, the defendants’ supporters answer on cost and feasibility: Midjourney and Runway say it is not possible to license content at the volume needed to train a model, and CCIA, NetChoice and TechNet say lost licensing fees are not the kind of market harm fair use counts.
As we read the docket, the split is not simply creators against technology companies: a group of AI start-ups filed for the plaintiffs, and Wikimedia, a group of Members of Congress and investor Michael Moritz filed for neither party.
WME, proposed amicus brief, In re OpenAI, Inc. Copyright Infringement Litigation, 30 October 2026
“WME’s position is therefore not that AI use of creative materials should be stopped, but that it should be licensed.”
Three Implications
FOR AI MODEL MAKERS The plaintiffs’ supporters argue that a licensing market for training data already exists; the defendants’ supporters argue that licensing at training scale is not feasible.
FOR RIGHTS HOLDERS Agencies, unions, music groups and news organisations have put licensing at the centre of their briefs, alongside a group of AI start-ups on the same side.
FOR INVESTORS By our count, 23 of the 37 briefs that pick a side back the plaintiffs, about 62%, with Khosla Ventures among those filing for OpenAI.
The framework argues: “The Corpus Moat — built by pretraining, eroding as the public web is exhausted and synthetic data closes gaps.”
As we read it, this case is a fight over the price of that corpus: the plaintiffs’ side argues that the data behind pretraining has to be licensed, and the defendants’ side argues that it does not. The framework does not discuss this litigation.
What Is Not Established
These are proposed briefs: each was filed with a motion asking the court for leave to file it, and we did not see rulings on those motions on the docket pages we read on 3 November. The court has not ruled on the summary judgment motions.
Our count covers the docket pages we read on 3 November. Some briefs had no copy on CourtListener, and we read cover pages rather than every brief in full, so the side split is based on what each brief or its docket entry states.
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Hollywood’s agencies, unions and music groups have joined the Times’ side in the OpenAI copyright case, and by our count of the docket the proposed briefs split 23 for the plaintiffs and 14 for the defendants. Both sides are arguing about the same thing: whether training data has to be licensed.
A note on sourcing. Axios reported the briefs on 3 November 2026. We read the docket of In re OpenAI, Inc. Copyright Infringement Litigation on CourtListener on 3 November and the cover pages of the proposed briefs it holds; the quotations are from the briefs filed by WME, the unions, the music groups, the Human Consent Foundation, Midjourney and Runway, and CCIA, NetChoice and TechNet.
The 51, 23, 14, 6 and 8 figures and the 62% share are our count. We did not contact the parties or the amici.
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur (for example, How to Digitize a Family Business in Europe) and HackerNoon. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
