Earlier this month, Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI were hit with a class action lawsuit alleging that they violated copyright law with their AI-powered coding assistant GitHub Copilot.

"This is the first step in what will be a long jour­ney," wrote Matthew Butterick, programmer and lawyer who filed the lawsuit with the Joseph Saveri Law Firm, on a public website providing updates about the litigation. "As far as we know, this is the first class-action case in the U.S. challeng­ing the train­ing and out­put of AI sys­tems."