The overlooked fair use defense in AI summary copyright disputes: The Cohere, Perplexity, and OpenAI cases
The Missing Fair Use Argument in the Copyright Battle Over AI Summaries
AI summary
No court has yet answered a fundamental question in AI summary copyright litigation: whether summaries, even when approximating protected content, can still constitute fair use. In November 2025, the Southern District of New York dismissed Cohere's motion to dismiss, finding that its summaries nearly copied the publishers' original works verbatim, with one instance reproducing eight of ten paragraphs from a New Yorker article. In April 2025, the same court found that ChatGPT and CoPilot summaries were not substantially similar to CIR news.