DeviantArt Lawsuit: Claims, Defenses, and Current Status

The DeviantArt lawsuit is Andersen v. Stability AI Ltd., a class-action copyright case filed in January 2023 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, naming DeviantArt alongside Stability AI, Midjourney, and later Runway AI. The artists behind the suit claim these companies used billions of copyrighted images to train AI art generators without permission, and DeviantArt was pulled in because of DreamUp, its own Stable Diffusion-powered image tool. As of mid-2026, the case is still pending, most claims against DeviantArt have been narrowed or dismissed, but a copyright infringement claim remains alive, with a summary judgment hearing set for February 17, 2027, and trial listed for April 5, 2027.¹²

Why DeviantArt Was Named as a Defendant

DeviantArt is one of the oldest and largest online art communities, hosting millions of user-uploaded works. Wix.com acquired it in 2017 for roughly $36 million.³ On November 11, 2022, the platform launched DreamUp, an AI image generator built on Stable Diffusion.⁴ That launch is what put DeviantArt in the lawsuit two months later.

DeviantArt’s CEO Moti Levy acknowledged the tool was essentially Stable Diffusion, a system widely criticized for being trained on images scraped from the internet without artists’ consent.⁵ DeviantArt said it did not use images uploaded to its platform to train the underlying model. But by deploying a tool many of its own artists viewed as built on stolen work, it drew furious backlash from the community it depended on.

The opt-out setup made things worse. When DreamUp launched, the default allowed artists’ work to be used for “direct inspiration” by the tool. Creators had to toggle settings manually on each piece or submit an account-wide request that could take up to ten days to process.⁵ Many artists pointed out that opting out was essentially meaningless because Stable Diffusion had already been trained on their work and could not unlearn it. DeviantArt eventually flipped the default so all works were opted out, introduced “noai” and “noimageai” metadata tags for scrapers to read, and updated its Terms of Service to bar the use of tagged content for AI training.⁶ Artists broadly called those measures too little, too late.

Who Is Suing and What They Want

Artists Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, and Karla Ortiz brought the original complaint on January 13, 2023.⁷ They are represented by the Joseph Saveri Law Firm and attorney Matthew Butterick, the same team behind parallel suits against AI coding tools and large language models.⁸

The plaintiff group grew. A first amended complaint in November 2023 added seven artist-plaintiffs, including Grzegorz Rutkowski, Gregory Manchess, Gerald Brom, Jingna Zhang, Julia Kaye, Adam Ellis, and Hawke Southworth, and added Runway AI as a fourth defendant.⁹¹⁰

The suit seeks money damages and an injunction to stop the AI companies from using artists’ work without authorization. Plaintiffs’ counsel has compared the strategy to the music industry’s move from illegal file-sharing to licensed platforms, arguing AI companies should be required to license training data.¹¹

What DeviantArt Argued in Its Defense

DeviantArt’s defense has been narrower than the other companies’. It has contended it did not train the Stable Diffusion model and only gave users access to a third-party tool through DreamUp, which would make it a platform rather than a direct infringer.¹²

Alongside that role-specific argument, all four defendants share a broader position: that training an AI model on copyrighted images is fair use, that artistic style is not copyrightable, and that any AI-generated output is transformative rather than derivative.¹³

What Claims Against DeviantArt Are Still Alive

Judge William H. Orrick has issued two major rulings on motions to dismiss, and together they define what DeviantArt still faces.

The October 2023 Ruling

On October 30, 2023, Judge Orrick largely granted the defendants’ motions, calling the original complaint “defective in many respects.”¹³ The only claim left standing was direct copyright infringement against Stability AI over its use of scraped training images.¹⁰ All other claims, including the DMCA, right of publicity, unfair competition, and breach of DeviantArt’s Terms of Service, were dismissed, but plaintiffs were given leave to amend.¹²

The court noted the complaint described DeviantArt as “simply provid[ing] customers access to Stable Diffusion” and told plaintiffs to plead more specific facts connecting DeviantArt to any alleged infringement.¹²

The August 2024 Ruling

After the amended complaint, the defendants moved again. On August 12, 2024, Judge Orrick issued a mixed order.

For DeviantArt specifically, two things happened:

The copyright claim against DeviantArt was found sufficiently amended to survive. Judge Orrick found that DeviantArt’s fact-based arguments about its limited role were inappropriate to resolve at the motion-to-dismiss stage.¹⁴¹⁵
The breach of contract claim against DeviantArt was dismissed with prejudice, meaning it cannot be refiled. Judge Orrick found DeviantArt had not exceeded the scope of its license when it incorporated Stable Diffusion into DreamUp.¹⁵

The court also killed the DMCA claims against every defendant, including DeviantArt, with prejudice. The court adopted an “identicality” requirement, ruling that because no AI output was alleged to be identical to a plaintiff’s work, there could be no actionable “removal” of copyright management information. An unjust enrichment claim was dismissed as preempted by federal copyright law, with leave to amend.⁹

The net effect: DeviantArt is still on the hook for the copyright claim tied to its role in deploying DreamUp, but a large portion of the theories originally aimed at it have been eliminated permanently.

The “Contained in Some Manner” Question

One aspect of the August 2024 order matters for every defendant, DeviantArt included. The defendants argued that Stable Diffusion does not store copies of any training image, only abstract mathematical parameters. Judge Orrick ruled that distinction does not defeat the infringement claim at this stage, writing that copyrighted works may be “contained in Stable Diffusion as algorithmic or mathematical representations” and that being “fixed in a different medium” is not a barrier.¹⁰

The court pointed to a statement by Stability AI’s former CEO, Emad Mostaque, that the company had compressed “100,000 gigabytes of images into a two gigabyte file” capable of “recreating” those images, along with academic research showing training images can sometimes be reproduced from AI models using specific prompts.¹⁶ Whether those reproductions are “glitches” or “by design” is a factual question the court left for summary judgment or trial.

If the ruling holds through summary judgment, it would undercut the AI industry’s core defense that training produces only unprotectable mathematical abstractions.¹⁰

Where the Case Stands Now

The pleadings have moved through several rounds. A second amended complaint was filed on October 31, 2024, and the defendants filed their answers on December 6, 2024. A third amended complaint followed on February 27, 2026, with defendants answering on March 13, 2026.¹⁷ The case remains before Judge Orrick, with the most recent docket activity as of May 2026.¹⁸

Discovery has been active and contentious. In March 2025, a magistrate judge resolved disputes over electronically stored information protocols, capping each side at 12 custodians and 15 search terms per custodian per party, with detailed validation procedures.¹⁹ A separate ruling capped plaintiff depositions at 30.²⁰

No class has been certified yet. As of January 2026, the plaintiffs had not filed a formal motion for class certification but said they intended to. They described the proposed class as individuals whose copyright-protected works were used to train the defendants’ models without authorization, and estimated it could number in the millions. The defendants have signaled they will oppose certification, arguing that individual issues will predominate.²¹

In February 2026, Judge Orrick granted a plaintiffs’ request to push scheduling deadlines back by roughly three months. The hearing on summary judgment is now set for February 17, 2027.¹ A case tracker maintained by Baker Law lists the trial date as April 5, 2027.²

How the DeviantArt Case Fits the Broader Fight

Andersen is one lawsuit among many, and DeviantArt’s exposure sits inside a much larger legal picture. Stability AI is also being sued separately by Getty Images over the appearance of Getty watermarks in AI-generated outputs. That case was filed in the Northern District of California in August 2025, with trial scheduled for early 2028.²²²³²⁴ Twelve copyright cases against OpenAI and Microsoft were consolidated into a multidistrict litigation proceeding in the Southern District of New York in April 2025.²⁰ Cases against Meta, NVIDIA, Anthropic, Google, and others are proceeding in various federal courts.²

None of those other suits name DeviantArt. Its legal exposure runs through Andersen and the surviving copyright claim over DreamUp. Whether that claim reaches a jury, gets resolved on summary judgment, or settles will likely turn on how Judge Orrick handles the “contained in some manner” question and how the record develops around what DreamUp actually did with which images.

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ChatGPT Is Eating the World. Sarah Andersen’s Copyright Lawsuit Gets Pushed Back Again at Her Request
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