April 3 (Reuters) - A U.S. judicial panel decided on

Thursday to consolidate in New York several copyright cases

brought by prominent authors and news outlets against OpenAI and

its largest backer Microsoft ( MSFT ).

The U.S. Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation's order

moves California lawsuits brought by Ta-Nehisi Coates, comedian

Sarah Silverman and other writers to Manhattan federal court to

be joined with similar cases from news publications including

The New York Times ( NYT ) and authors including John Grisham,

Jonathan Franzen and George R.R. Martin.

OpenAI proposed consolidating the cases in northern

California, while most of the plaintiffs opposed centralizing

the cases.

"We welcome this development and look forward to making it

clear in court that our models are trained on publicly available

data, grounded in fair use, and supportive of innovation," an

OpenAI spokesperson said.

Representatives and attorneys for Microsoft ( MSFT ), the Times and

the authors did not immediately respond to requests for comment

on the decision.

The cases are part of a wave of high-stakes litigation

against tech companies including OpenAI, Microsoft ( MSFT ) and Meta

Platforms ( META ) from copyright owners who allege that the companies

used their material without permission to train AI systems.

Judges are just beginning to consider whether the tech

companies are immune from the allegations based on U.S.

copyright law's "fair use" doctrine, which allows for the

unauthorized use of copyrighted works in some circumstances.

OpenAI asked the panel last year to combine 12 lawsuits from

writers and news outlets into a single case for pretrial

proceedings, arguing that they stemmed from "the same underlying

allegations: that OpenAI used plaintiffs' copyrighted works to

train certain large language models." The plaintiffs argued

that their cases were too different to justify centralizing

them.

The panel said on Thursday that joining the cases before

U.S. District Judge Sidney Stein would "serve the convenience of

the parties and witnesses and promote the just and efficient

conduct of this litigation."

Stein currently presides over the New York cases brought by

the authors and the Times.

Read more:

Tech companies face tough AI copyright questions in 2025

NY court rejects authors' bid to block OpenAI cases from

NYT, others

(Reporting by Blake Brittain in Washington)