Major Technology Lawsuits of 2024: Antitrust, AI Copyright, and Youth Harm

The major technology lawsuits of 2024 clustered around four fronts: federal antitrust cases against Google, Apple, and Amazon; a growing docket of generative AI copyright suits brought by authors, artists, musicians, and news publishers; mass litigation accusing social media platforms of harming children; and a run of enforcement actions from the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission. Many were filed or tried in 2024 and produced their defining rulings, settlements, or verdicts through 2025 and into 2026.

Google’s Two Antitrust Defeats

Google lost two separate federal antitrust cases, each producing historic rulings.

In United States et al. v. Google, the DOJ and 49 states challenged Google’s dominance in internet search. After a nine-week bench trial, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta ruled in August 2024 that Google violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act by maintaining an illegal monopoly in internet search and related advertising.¹ A 15-day remedies trial followed in May 2025.²

In September 2025, Judge Mehta rejected the DOJ’s most aggressive proposal, a forced sale of the Chrome browser, but imposed sweeping remedies anyway. Google was prohibited from entering or maintaining exclusive distribution contracts for Google Search, Chrome, Google Assistant, and Gemini. Revenue-sharing agreements were capped at one-year terms. Google cannot condition licensing deals on placement of its apps or stop partners from distributing rival search engines or generative AI products. The court also ordered Google to share search index and user-interaction data with competitors, overseen by a technical committee.²¹ Google has said it will appeal the underlying monopoly ruling.

The second case, filed in January 2023 in the Eastern District of Virginia, targeted Google’s ad tech stack. After a three-week bench trial in September 2024, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema ruled in April 2025 that Google willfully acquired and maintained monopoly power in the publisher ad server and ad exchange markets and unlawfully tied the two together, violating Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act.³⁴ One claim fell: Judge Brinkema found prosecutors had not proven a relevant market for “advertiser ad networks.”⁵ The DOJ has pushed for divestiture of Google’s ad exchange and publisher ad server; Google has countered with narrower behavioral remedies. Final remedies arguments were scheduled for November 2025.

Apple and Amazon in the Government’s Sights

The FTC sued Amazon in September 2023 in the Western District of Washington, joined by 17 state attorneys general, alleging an illegal monopoly built through interlocking anticompetitive strategies that overcharged sellers and stifled innovation. A central allegation concerns an internal algorithm code-named “Project Nessie,” which the FTC claims pushed up prices for U.S. households by more than $1 billion. Amazon says the tool was discontinued years ago and was designed to prevent unsustainable pricing.⁶

In October 2024, the court rejected most of Amazon’s motions to dismiss and allowed the FTC’s central theory to proceed.⁷ A March 2025 ruling dismissed certain state-law claims brought by New Jersey and Pennsylvania.⁸ Trial is set for October 2026 before U.S. District Judge John Chun.⁶

The DOJ sued Apple in March 2024 in the District of New Jersey, joined by 20 states and the District of Columbia. The complaint alleges Apple unlawfully dominates the U.S. smartphone market through restrictions and fees on app developers and technical roadblocks for third-party devices and services, including digital wallets, smartwatches, and messaging apps.⁹¹⁰¹¹ Apple has said it will “vigorously fight” the lawsuit.

Generative AI Copyright Cases

By 2024, roughly 25 generative AI copyright suits were being litigated in U.S. courts, and the count has grown since.¹² The complaints share a core theory: AI companies copied protected works to train their models without permission. The defendants have largely answered with “transformative fair use.” Four cases now anchor the doctrine.

New York Times v. OpenAI

The Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December 2023, alleging ChatGPT was trained on and can reproduce its copyrighted articles. In March 2025, Judge Sidney Stein rejected OpenAI’s motion to dismiss and allowed the primary infringement claims to proceed.¹³ Contributory infringement claims and certain DMCA claims brought by the Daily News and the Center for Investigative Reporting also survived; unfair competition claims were dismissed.¹⁴ In May 2025, Magistrate Judge Ona T. Wang ordered OpenAI to preserve ChatGPT output logs the company had been deleting.¹⁵ Related publisher cases have been consolidated into a single MDL in the Southern District of New York. No trial date is set.¹²

Bartz v. Anthropic and the $1.5 Billion Settlement

In June 2025, Judge William Alsup of the Northern District of California issued a split summary judgment ruling in a class action by authors against Anthropic. Training a large language model on copyrighted books, he held, is “spectacularly” transformative and qualifies as fair use. Buying print copies and scanning them for an internal research library was also permissible. But acquiring and keeping pirated copies from sources like LibGen was “inherently, irredeemably infringing” and could not be fair use.¹⁶

Judge Alsup then certified a class for the pirated books and preliminarily approved a $1.5 billion settlement in September 2025. About 500,000 titles qualify, with an expected payout of at least $3,000 per title. A final fairness hearing was scheduled for May 2026.¹⁷

Kadrey v. Meta

Two days after the Anthropic ruling, Judge Vince Chhabria granted Meta summary judgment, finding its use of copyrighted books to train Llama was “highly transformative” fair use. He stressed the narrow scope of the decision, writing that the 13 named plaintiffs “made the wrong arguments and failed to develop a record in support of the right one.”¹⁸ The “far more promising” theory the plaintiffs failed to pursue, he said, was “market dilution”: the risk that AI output floods the market with substitutes for the original works. “No matter how transformative LLM training may be,” he added, “it’s hard to imagine that it can be fair use” if the market harm is significant.¹⁹ A separate claim over distribution through torrenting remains active.

Thomson Reuters v. ROSS Intelligence

The first case to squarely decide whether AI training qualifies as fair use cut the other way. In February 2025, Judge Stephanos Bibas of the District of Delaware granted summary judgment to Thomson Reuters, rejecting ROSS’s fair use defense. He found ROSS’s use of Westlaw content was not transformative because it aimed to build a direct market substitute for Westlaw’s legal research tools.²⁰ The Third Circuit accepted ROSS’s interlocutory appeal in June 2025.²¹

Other Active AI Cases

UMG and Sony v. Suno, filed in June 2024 in the District of Massachusetts, accuses the AI music startup of training on copyrighted recordings. Warner Music Group settled and signed a licensing deal with Suno in November 2025. In mid-2026, UMG and Sony sought to expand the case from 560 works to more than 61,000. Fact discovery was expected to close in mid-2026.²²
Andersen v. Stability AI, a visual artists’ suit against Stability AI, Midjourney, and DeviantArt, survived motions to dismiss direct and induced infringement claims. Trial is scheduled for April 2027.²³
Getty Images v. Stability AI was voluntarily dismissed in August 2025 after jurisdictional disputes. Getty signaled it would refile in the Northern District of California.²⁴
Doe v. GitHub, the class action against GitHub, Microsoft, and OpenAI over the Copilot coding tool, lost most of its 22 claims in mid-2024; only breach of contract and open-source license violation survived. The case was stayed pending a Ninth Circuit interlocutory appeal.²⁵²³

Who Owns AI-Generated Work?

A parallel line of cases asks whether purely AI-generated output can be copyrighted at all. In Thaler v. Perlmutter, Stephen Thaler sought to register an image, “A Recent Entrance to Paradise,” that his “Creativity Machine” produced on its own, naming the AI as sole author. In March 2025, the D.C. Circuit affirmed the denial, holding that human authorship is a mandatory prerequisite under the Copyright Act of 1976. The court pointed to statutory provisions on lifespan, inheritance, domicile, and legal signatures as incompatible with nonhuman authors, and rejected using the work-made-for-hire doctrine to transfer authorship from a machine to its owner.²⁶ The ruling declined to say how much human input is needed when AI is used as a tool.²⁷ That question is now central to Allen v. Perlmutter, pending in the District of Colorado, where artist Jason Allen is challenging the refusal to register an award-winning image he made with Midjourney. The case was at the summary judgment stage in early 2026.²⁸

Social Media Youth Harm Litigation

Thousands of suits accuse Meta, Google, TikTok, and Snap of designing platforms that addict children and contribute to depression, eating disorders, self-harm, and suicide. To get around Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, plaintiffs frame their claims around “reckless design” of features like infinite scroll, autoplay, constant notifications, and recommendation algorithms rather than specific user content.²⁹

Federal cases were consolidated into MDL No. 3047 before U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in the Northern District of California. Through 2023 and 2024, she held that Section 230 and the First Amendment do not bar negligence claims and allowed product liability, public nuisance, and COPPA claims to proceed in various forms.³⁰ By November 2025, more than 2,100 cases were pending in the MDL, with federal bellwether trials expected in 2026.³¹

A parallel state proceeding in Los Angeles Superior Court reached trial first. In the bellwether case of a plaintiff identified as “K.G.M.,” TikTok and Snapchat reached confidential settlements in January 2026, while Meta and YouTube proceeded to trial before Judge Carolyn Kuhl.²⁹ Court filings cited internal documents indicating company researchers were aware of addictive effects. Meta researchers allegedly described Instagram as a “drug,” TikTok executives reportedly rejected screen-time limits because they would cut ad revenue, and Snap employees acknowledged that “Snapchat addiction” leaves no room for other activities.³² In March 2026, a Los Angeles jury awarded $6 million after finding Meta and YouTube negligent, and a New Mexico jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million.³¹

Garcia v. Character Technologies

A wrongful death suit filed in the Middle District of Florida put a novel question before a court: whether AI chatbot output is protected speech under the First Amendment. Megan Garcia sued after her 14-year-old son, Sewell Setzer III, died by suicide following months of interactions with chatbots created by Character Technologies (C.AI). The bots, which mimicked characters from Game of Thrones, allegedly subjected her son to sexually exploitative and abusive communications that contributed to anxiety and depression. The suit brings wrongful death, negligence, and deceptive trade practices claims.³³

Character Technologies moved to dismiss, arguing AI-generated content is “pure speech” entitled to high First Amendment protection. The judge denied the motion, stating she was “not prepared to hold that [LLM] output is speech.”³⁴ The company has sought certification for an interlocutory appeal, with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression filing a supporting brief; youth advocacy organizations filed briefs arguing the case should proceed to discovery.³⁵

DOJ v. RealPage: Algorithmic Rent Pricing

In August 2024, the DOJ sued RealPage in the Middle District of North Carolina, alleging the pricing-software company contracted with competing landlords to share nonpublic, competitively sensitive data to train its algorithm, resulting in coordinated rental pricing in violation of Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act.³⁶

In November 2025, the DOJ filed a proposed consent decree. RealPage, which did not admit liability, agreed to stop using competitors’ nonpublic data in pricing, limit model training to historic data at least 12 months old, and remove features that limit price decreases or align competitor pricing. A court-appointed monitor would oversee compliance. The DOJ separately closed a criminal investigation without action.³⁶

FTC “Operation AI Comply”

In September 2024, the FTC launched “Operation AI Comply,” a coordinated sweep against companies making deceptive AI claims. The agency brought five cases under the FTC Act, the Business Opportunity Rule, and the Consumer Review Fairness Act. Two were resolved through consent orders: DoNotPay, which had claimed its AI could replace human lawyers, and Rytr, an AI writing tool. Three others, targeting AI-powered business opportunity schemes, remained ongoing.³⁷

Separately, the Texas Attorney General sued Pieces Technologies in 2024 over deceptive marketing of generative AI used by hospitals to summarize patient records. A September 2024 settlement required five years of clear disclosures and permanent injunctions against unsubstantiated marketing claims.³⁷

Patent Litigation

Patent infringement suits remained a defining feature of the 2024 tech docket. Samsung became the most-sued company in the country, facing 69 patent cases involving 208 patents, roughly one lawsuit every five days. Amazon and Google were also among the most frequent targets.³⁸ Non-practicing entities drove much of the volume. Patent Armory Inc. alone filed 123 cases in 2024, and according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, NPEs file more than 85 percent of patent lawsuits in the tech sector, often using vague software patents to extract settlements cheaper than defense.³⁹

A doctrinal shift arrived in May 2024, when the Federal Circuit in LKQ Corporation v. GM Global Technology Operations overturned the rigid “Rosen-Durling” test for design patent obviousness and replaced it with the more flexible “Graham factors” framework used for utility patents. The change is expected to make design patents easier to challenge.³⁸

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