On July 13, 2026, McKool Smith published a new edition of its AI Litigation Tracker, prepared by principal Avery Williams, mapping where the first wave of media and entertainment training disputes stand. Read across the entries, and a pattern emerges: most AI infringement cases are grinding through discovery, jurisdiction, and threshold motions rather than producing blockbuster rulings on the merits.
Where AI infringement cases stand after spring rulings
According to McKool Smith’s tracker on July 13, 2026, the firm is following a cluster of disputes that artists, labels, and studios brought against model builders and music tools. Earlier updates sketch the posture. On April 20, 2026, the tracker noted that in Sony v. Uncharted Labs (Udio), the court denied the defendants’ motion to dismiss “for now,” keeping claims alive while issues are sorted. On April 13, 2026, the tracker recorded that in Disney et al. v. MiniMax & Hailuo AI, the defendants filed motions to dismiss, setting up another early test of the pleadings.
Discovery is the other drumbeat. A May 18, 2026 entry on Sarah Andersen et al. v. Stability AI flags ongoing discovery disputes, including a court order granting a request for the issuance of letters, a tell that parties are still wrestling over evidence and scope. A May 5, 2026 note on the Southern District of New York multi-district litigation (MDL) says discovery filings persisted despite a nominal close, with straggler issues still open. That’s common in consolidated proceedings; the Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation allows complex cases to be coordinated, but loose threads can linger as parties resolve remaining quarrels. For background on how MDLs work, the U.S. panel’s overview is useful reading.
Procedural maneuvering extends to appeals strategy. On June 18, 2026, the tracker reports that in Richard Kadrey, et al. v. Meta, the plaintiffs moved to certify certain summary judgment questions for interlocutory appeal—an attempt to surface legal issues early, before a full trial record forms. It’s another sign that parties want clarity on core questions, but courts are not rushing to broad pronouncements.
Why the pace favors procedure over precedent in AI copyright disputes
The throughline is straightforward: most claims will live or die on facts that judges want built out first—what data was used, how models were trained, whether outputs are substantially similar, and what technical measures were bypassed, if any. That’s why the tracker’s snapshots of ongoing discovery and skirmishes over letters, preservation, and scope matter more than any single filing date. The legal theories are ambitious, but the record is still forming.
McKool Smith’s notes on the SDNY MDL and the Stability AI case reflect that evidentiary drag. Parties need to identify training sources and methods with specificity, then test them against fair use defenses, implied license arguments, and Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) claims. The U.S. Copyright Office has been collecting guidance and comments on these issues; its resource hub offers a clear primer on what’s at stake for rightsholders and developers copyright.gov.
The upshot: case calendars stretch, settlement leverage shifts with each discovery win, and the chance for a quick, definitive ruling stays low. That is why AI infringement cases are moving slower than public debate would suggest.
The YouTube “rolling cypher” wrinkle and what it could mean
The April 20, 2026 tracker entry nods to a technical subplot with outsized legal impact: the YouTube “rolling cypher.” In plain terms, it refers to the changing signatures YouTube uses to control access to video streams. Whether bypassing that mechanism is “circumvention” under DMCA 1201 has been hotly debated for years. For context, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has documented the legal back-and-forth that followed industry efforts to remove the youtube-dl tool, which turned in part on this very question (EFF background).
Why it matters here: if courts accept a broad view of circumvention tied to YouTube’s technical controls, music-focused tools accused of scraping could face DMCA exposure on top of copyright claims. The McKool Smith tracker’s mention signals this issue is surfacing in active pleadings, not just in policy forums.
What to watch next as AI infringement cases mature
From McKool Smith’s July 13, 2026 update backward, the near-term milestones are clear. First, rulings on the Disney-related motions to dismiss will test how far plaintiffs can push training-based claims at the pleading stage. Second, discovery orders in the Stability AI matter—and any follow-on sanctions or compulsion—will shape how much visibility plaintiffs get into datasets and pipelines. Third, any court engagement with the “rolling cypher” theory could ripple across music and video suits.
Expect class certification battles to loom, too. The tracker’s cadence suggests plaintiffs are probing pathways that work for groups of creators, while defendants aim to fracture cases into highly individual disputes. That concern will echo in the SDNY MDL, where coordination saves time but does not erase the need for case-by-case findings.
For media companies and model builders, the practical takeaway is simple. Map your data provenance, document technical controls, and prepare for extended discovery. The law is forming around facts, and those facts will decide which AI infringement cases set the first real precedent.
McKool Smith’s AI Litigation Tracker is a useful pulse check as this first docket wave unfolds. You can browse the firm’s running updates, authored by Avery Williams, on its site www.mckoolsmith.com. For broader context on the technology under scrutiny, a concise overview of generative systems and their uses is also helpful for non-lawyers; Google’s Gemini branding aside, the legal stakes lie in how models are trained and deployed, not in the marketing of agent platforms. Readers seeking a primer on the enterprise agent trend can find one from Google Cloud cloud.google.com, though the courtroom action centers on data and copyrights—not features. For more on this, see bloomberg.com and nytimes.com.