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The fair use doctrine underpinning copyright law was built for single-work analysis, and AI model training at scale has produced a category of disputes that framework was never designed to handle.
Held, a global consulting firm, released its Q2 2026 AI Disputes Monitor on July 15, documenting copyright cases as the dominant category in its proprietary AI disputes dashboard, with regulatory and product liability challenges registered as emerging alongside them.
Copyright at the center Fair use evaluates a secondary use across four factors: purpose, nature, the portion copied, and market effect.
Applying that test to the training of a large-scale AI model asks courts to extrapolate from a doctrine built for one work at a time.
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