The first jury trial over AI image training has been pushed back to April 2027
&imwidth=600&imheight=450&format=webp&quality=medium "The first jury trial over AI image training has been pushed back to April 2027")
The first jury trial over AI image training has been pushed back to April 2027 Photograph: (X)
Andersen v. Stability AI — the case brought by visual artists against the makers of AI image generators — was set to become the first US jury trial over whether training AI on copyrighted images is infringement. It had been scheduled to begin on 8 September. According to case trackers, it has slipped to April 2027.
The first US jury trial over whether training AI image generators on copyrighted work is infringement was supposed to have started last week. It has not.
Andersen v. Stability AI had been scheduled to begin on 8 September. According to case trackers, the trial date has now slipped to 5 April 2027 — a delay of roughly seven months.
The Case
The lawsuit was filed in January 2023 in the Northern District of California by three visual artists: Sarah Andersen, Karla Ortiz and Kelly McKernan. It has since expanded to include additional plaintiffs and now names four defendants: Stability AI, Midjourney, DeviantArt and Runway AI.
At its centre is LAION, a dataset of around five billion images scraped from the internet and used to develop AI image generators. The artists argue that including their work in that data to train commercial systems was copyright infringement.
Why This Trial Matters So Much
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Most AI copyright disputes so far have been resolved through motions, settlements or rulings on narrow questions. This case was set to put the central question in front of a jury.
That distinction is significant. A judge's ruling on a legal question is one kind of precedent. A jury verdict on whether a specific training practice caused harm to specific artists is another — and it would be the first time ordinary citizens, rather than lawyers and judges, weighed in on whether this is fair.
Every AI company that trained on scraped images has an interest in the answer. So does every artist whose work was online.
What Seven Months Means
A delay in a complex case is not unusual, and the reasons for schedule changes are often procedural.
But the practical effect is real. The legal uncertainty over AI training continues for most of another year. Companies keep building on the same practices. And artists who say they are losing work to AI tools wait longer for any judgment on whether that loss has a legal remedy.
The market is not waiting for the court. AI image generation continues to grow, and whatever the jury eventually decides will land on an industry that has moved on considerably since the case was filed.
The Wider Pattern
Artists have scored some procedural wins in AI copyright litigation, and several claims have survived attempts to dismiss them.
Yet surveys of working artists report widespread lost income regardless of how the cases are going. That gap — between legal progress and economic reality — is part of what makes the timing of a verdict matter. Remedies that arrive years after the market has shifted may be symbolic for many of the people who brought the fight.
What To Watch
Whether the April 2027 date holds, or slips again. Whether any of the four defendants settles before trial, which would remove the chance of a jury verdict against them. And how other AI copyright cases — involving text, music and news — proceed in the meantime, since the first verdict in any of them will shape how all the others are argued.
