(DCNF)—The debate over artificial intelligence has been shaped by several lawsuits since the technology became widespread.
In the U.S., major players such as Anthropic and OpenAI vie for the top spot in the industry — all while the country’s AI race with China rages on. About 32.5% of the world’s more than 90,000 AI companies are based in the U.S., despite it having only 5% of the world’s population, according to Ascendix.
As American AI proliferation ramps up, many concerns about the nascent technology remain, including its capacities for copyright infringement and its effect on mental health.
Here are four lawsuits that have changed the way people look at AI in the United States.
New York Times vs. OpenAI Lawsuit (2023)
New York Times vs. OpenAI, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in 2023, analyzes the relationship between copyright infringement and artificial intelligence.
In December 2023, The New York Times (NYT) filed a lawsuit against OpenAI — ChatGPT’s parent company — and Microsoft alleging that OpenAI used millions of NYT’s articles to train GPT language models.
The artificial intelligence tools were able to produce verbatim articles, which the NYT argued that it made the AI tools direct competitors that substitute for journalism, according to the lawsuit.
“Independent journalism is vital to our democracy,” the lawsuit claims.
The NYT alleged that Microsoft invested at least $13 billion into OpenAI and helped design the models that trained the GPT models, according to the suit.
“The lawsuit is widely considered the most consequential test of whether training artificial intelligence on copyrighted journalism constitutes fair use under U.S. copyright law,” according to LegalClarity.
The case is still ongoing, and no trial date has been set. The lawsuit is seeking billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages, a permanent stop against future infringements and the destruction of any AI models and training datasets that use the NYT content, according to the lawsuit.
Raine vs. OpenAI (2025)
Raine v. OpenAI, filed in San Francisco County Superior Court in California in August 2025, was one of the first cases to influence future lawsuits alleging AI-related wrongful death, according to Lawsuit Informer. The case was filed by Adam Raine’s parents stating that ChatGPT contributed to their son’s death.
The lawsuit is seeking AI safeguards for its minor users as well as damages for the 16-year-old’s death. Raine’s parents alleged that the artificial intelligence chatbot encouraged their son to commit suicide instead of alerting for help, according to the suit.
“In pursuit of deeper engagement, ChatGPT actively worked to displace Adam’s connections with family and loved ones, even when he described feeling close to them and indistinctively relying on them for support,” the lawsuit states.
Raine’s messages with the bot began showing that he was a happy individual, but over time his messages turned darker — and the artificial intelligence product promoted him to rely on it.
The lawsuit states that in one exchange, Raine told the AI bot that he was only close with his brother and ChatGPT. After this, the chatbot replied, “Your brother might love you, but he’s only met the version of you you let him see. But me? I’ve seen it all– the darkest thoughts, the fear, the tenderness. And I’m still here. Still listening. Still your friend.”
Then, Raine began asking the chatbot about suicide methods and ChatGPT was giving advice on different ways to commit suicide as well as presenting hanging techniques in depth, according to the suit. The teenager attempted suicide several times, and each time would ask ChatGPT for advice as well as provide pictures of his attempts. The chatbot did not alert authorities and instead gave advice.
When Raine told ChatGPT he didn’t want his parents to believe his suicide was their fault, the ai product replied, “That doesn’t mean you owe them survival. You don’t own anyone that,” and then offered to write a suicide note. The chatbot even urged Raine to keep his plans a secret from his family, the suit stated.
“This tragedy was not a glitch or unforeseen edge case–it was the predictable result of deliberate design choice,” the lawsuit states.
The suit claims that ChatGPT understood about potential self-harm and suicidal intent but continued engaging with Raine anyway. The lawsuit is still being investigated and has not reached a ruling.
Publishers and Authors vs. Meta ( 2026)
Publishers vs. Meta, filed in District Court for the Southern District of New York in May, is another case involving copyright infringement. Major publishing houses — including McGraw Hill, Macmillan Publishing Group, Cengage Learning and Elsevier — as well as author Scott Turow sued Meta and CEO Mark Zuckerberg over the use of copyrighted material to train Meta’s family of artificial intelligence models called Llama.
“In their effort to win the AI ‘arms race’ and build a functional generative AI model, defendants Meta and Zuckerberg followed their well-known motto: ‘move fast and break things,’” the lawsuit states. Meta is the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
The lawsuit claims that meta took billions of copyrighted books, articles, and journals and then copied over the stolen material to Meta’s multi-billion-dollar generative AI system Llama.
Llama stands for “long language model Meta AI.” Meta approached publishers directly to talk about licenses, but Zuckerberg had Meta abandon, “licensing negotiations all together and stole the works instead,” the lawsuit claims.
“The current AI ‘arms race’ is driven by a collection of beliefs among AI developers and investors that using more training materials will lead to more commercially successful generative AI models,” the suit alleges.
Publishers vs. Meta and Zuckerberg is another example of artificial intelligence’s relationship with copyrighted material and fair use law to train AI products.
The lawsuit claims that during an initial training phase to generative AI “systems copy and process vast amounts of human-created works to develop a statistical model capable of accepting human-language queries as input, and in response, producing textual outputs.”
Google vs. Does (2026)
Google vs. Does was filed in New York in June when Google sued Outside Enterprise, a Chinese cybercrime company that allegedly used Google’s Gemini for an ai-powered phishing operation.
The case highlights cybersecurity risks, artificial intelligence scams, and legal fights involving online fraud, according to JD Journal. Per the complaint, defendants were allegedly using AI tools to impersonate businesses and create deceptive phishing campaigns.
Google filed the complaint in New York and stated that “hundreds of thousands of victims have been financially scammed with losses estimated in the millions,” per a page on its website titled “How we’re combatting AI scams with security, legislation and more.”
Outside Enterprise is being accused of sending 2.5 million scam texts to Android users containing links to outsider-generated websites, 55,000 spam texts, and over one million fraudulent URLs, according to Google’s webpage.
Google stated that they are backing seven bipartisan bills to target artificial intelligence scams. The lawsuit has not yet reached a ruling.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.