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📝 Page Status: Draft — sourced but not yet reviewed

  • Status: draft
  • Sources: 3
  • Relationships: 6
  • Research debt items: 3

Andersen v. Stability AI Ltd.

Summary

Andersen v. Stability AI Ltd., No. 3:23-cv-00201 (N.D. Cal.), is a putative class action by visual artists against Stability AI, Midjourney, DeviantArt, and Runway AI over alleged copying of training images into Stable Diffusion and related products. On August 12, 2024, Judge William H. Orrick denied motions to dismiss the Copyright Act claims, denied Midjourney’s motion to dismiss Lanham Act claims, dismissed DMCA claims with prejudice, and dismissed unjust-enrichment and DeviantArt contract claims (the latter with prejudice). The order is a pleading decision, not a fair-use holding.

Verified Facts

  • The action was filed January 13, 2023, in the Northern District of California as No. 3:23-cv-00201.2
  • The first amended complaint names artists including Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan, Karla Ortiz, Hawke Southworth, Grzegorz Rutkowski, Gregory Manchess, Gerald Brom, Jingna Zhang, Julia Kaye, and Adam Ellis, and alleges that Stable Diffusion used their artistic works as training images and can produce outputs “in the style” of those images.1
  • Defendants addressed in the August 12, 2024 order are Stability AI Ltd. and Stability AI, Inc., Midjourney, Inc., DeviantArt, Inc., and Runway AI, Inc.1
  • Plaintiffs allege that LAION training sets were used to train versions of Stable Diffusion, that the LAION-5B dataset contains URLs rather than image files, and that anyone using that dataset must first acquire copies of the images from those URLs.1
  • On August 12, 2024, the court denied defendants’ motions to dismiss the Copyright Act claims, denied Midjourney’s motion to dismiss the Lanham Act claims, dismissed the DMCA claims with prejudice, dismissed unjust-enrichment claims with leave to amend, and dismissed DeviantArt’s breach-of-contract and implied-covenant claims with prejudice.1

Historical Context

Andersen is the leading U.S. visual-artist class action in the generative-image wave. It is distinct from Getty Images v. Stability AI, an English trial about secondary copyright and watermarks, and from Disney v. Midjourney, a studio character-output case. Named plaintiff Sarah Andersen also appears in In re Google Generative AI Copyright Litigation, a different docket.3 The August 2024 order cited the identicality approach from Doe v. GitHub when dismissing DMCA claims.1

Jurisdiction: Northern District of California. Authority level: Rule 12(b)(6) order. The court did not decide § 107 fair use.1

What survived is a training-copy and induced-infringement theory plus some Lanham Act “in the style of” claims against Midjourney. What did not survive is DMCA copyright-management-information removal, on an identical-copy requirement the court treated as fatal where outputs were not identical to training images.1 Later amended complaints and any class-certification or summary-judgment orders are outside the sources cited here.

Relationships

  • CASE-ANDERSEN-V-STABILITY cites SRC-ANDERSEN-V-STABILITY-MTD-2024.
  • CASE-ANDERSEN-V-STABILITY related_to TOPIC-AI-COPYRIGHT.
  • CASE-ANDERSEN-V-STABILITY related_to CASE-GETTY-V-STABILITY.
  • CASE-ANDERSEN-V-STABILITY related_to CASE-DISNEY-V-MIDJOURNEY.
  • CASE-ANDERSEN-V-STABILITY related_to CASE-DOE-V-GITHUB.
  • CASE-ANDERSEN-V-STABILITY related_to CASE-IN-RE-GOOGLE-GEN-AI.

Sources

  1. SRC-ANDERSEN-V-STABILITY-MTD-2024: Order on motions to dismiss FAC (Aug. 12, 2024).
  2. SRC-ANDERSEN-V-STABILITY-DOCKET: CourtListener docket for No. 3:23-cv-00201.
  3. SRC-GOOGLE-GEN-AI-MTD-2025: In re Google Generative AI MTD order (Sept. 11, 2025).

Research Debt

  • Add the original complaint, the FAC, and any later operative complaint as pleading sources.
  • Add the October 30, 2023 first MTD order and later discovery or class-certification orders from those PDFs.
  • Add trial-schedule facts only from a court scheduling order, not from secondary trackers.

Document metadata

  • Decision date: 2024-08-12
  • Last verified: 2026-09-02

  1. SRC-ANDERSEN-V-STABILITY-MTD-2024 — Order (Aug. 12, 2024). Primary for FAC parties, alleged theories, and holdings. ↩↩↩↩↩↩↩

  2. SRC-ANDERSEN-V-STABILITY-DOCKET — CourtListener docket for No. 3:23-cv-00201. Primary for filing date. ↩

  3. SRC-GOOGLE-GEN-AI-MTD-2025 — Order (Sept. 11, 2025). Primary for named-plaintiff overlap with the Google class action. ↩