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A Californian federal judge has allowed authors to broaden their legal challenge against Databricks, including newer models like DBRX, amid claims of unauthorised training on protected works, marking a significant procedural win in AI copyright litigation.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
A federal judge in California has allowed authors in a copyright suit against Databricks and its AI subsidiary Mosaic ML to broaden their case to include newer DBRX models, after they said the company had used protected books without permission to train the systems. According to the court\u2019s June 25, 2025 order in In re Mosaic LLM Litigation, the plaintiffs were also permitted to update the catalogue of works they say were copied. The ruling marked a procedural win for the copyright holders, even though the case had already been running for more than a year.<\/p>\n
The dispute began with claims that Mosaic ML had trained its MPT large language models on datasets containing the authors\u2019 works, with Databricks accused of being responsible as the parent company. After DBRX was released, the plaintiffs asked to add a direct infringement claim tied to that model as well. The court accepted that the request came late, but said the case was still in active discovery and the delay, by itself, did not justify shutting the amendment out.<\/p>\n
Databricks argued the authors were acting in bad faith, but the judge found no clear sign of strategic delay or dishonesty. The court also rejected the company\u2019s claim that the change would unfairly reshape the litigation, noting that discovery was already touching on DBRX and that the new allegations did not appear to require a wholly separate case theory. On the question of whether the new claims were too thin to survive, the court said that issue was better addressed after amendment rather than used to block it at the outset.<\/p>\n
The litigation did not end there. Bloomberg Law reported in August 2025 that the DBRX claims were later dismissed because the allegations were too vague, while the original MPT-related claims remained alive. That later ruling echoed a wider pattern in AI copyright disputes: courts are increasingly being asked to decide whether plaintiffs have said enough, with enough model-specific detail, to get past early motions to dismiss. Similar fights have also been playing out in cases involving Meta and Nvidia, while Anthropic\u2019s massive settlement with authors underscored the scale of financial exposure these disputes can create.<\/p>\n
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