Evidence by late 2025 shows that large generative‑AI providers have indeed faced exactly the kind of large‑scale, potentially existential copyright litigation Jason predicted.

Most clearly, Anthropic (developer of Claude) faced a certified US class action over using pirated books to train its models. Judge Alsup certified a class potentially covering up to 7 million works, with statutory damages that legal analysts estimated could reach hundreds of billions to over $1 trillion—described as an existential threat that could financially ruin Anthropic or even the broader AI industry if fully imposed.(arstechnica.com) Anthropic itself told the court it was under “inordinate pressure” to settle in order to avoid a potentially business‑ending trial; it then agreed to a proposed settlement of about $1.5 billion plus destruction of disputed training data—a huge payout, but far smaller than the theoretical maximum.(wired.com) This is exactly the scenario of being “sued into oblivion” in the sense of facing litigation whose potential damages could have wiped out the company, even though it likely survives via settlement.

OpenAI itself has also been hit with multiple major copyright and related suits over its training data and outputs: class actions by authors, a landmark lawsuit from The New York Times, and claims by other rightsholders, all challenging the legality of using copyrighted material for training GPT models.(en.wikipedia.org) Additional cases include a UK copyright/database‑rights lawsuit by Mumsnet over scraped forum content, and a German ruling that ChatGPT’s training on song lyrics violated national copyright law, resulting in damages.(thetimes.co.uk) Other major generative‑AI players like Midjourney and Stability AI are likewise embroiled in large copyright suits from artists and major film studios.(en.wikipedia.org)

While none of these companies has yet been literally destroyed, the prediction—as normalized to “major, potentially existential litigation over copyrighted training data on a scale that could severely threaten the business”—has clearly materialized. Multiple leading providers have been, and still are, defending against lawsuits whose claimed damages and legal theories plausibly threatened their core business models. On that basis, Jason’s prediction is best scored as right.