What is actually in dispute
Several very different things travel under the same heading. There are claims about training data and about outputs that resemble protected work, and claims that a system produced something false or damaging about a person or a company. There are claims arising from automated decisions in hiring, lending, insurance, or tenant screening, and from how those decisions were explained to the people affected. Then consumer protection claims about what a product was advertised to do, disputes over voice, image, and likeness, and ordinary commercial fights between a company and its model or software vendor, including trade secrets that left the building through a tool nobody approved. Whether you built the system, licensed it, or simply used it changes nearly every question that follows.
What to collect early
The vendor agreement first, particularly what it says about training on your inputs, ownership of outputs, indemnity, and data handling, since those clauses allocate risk that people assume is theirs alone. Then the operational record: prompts and logs, model and version information, and the specific outputs at issue captured with dates rather than described from memory. Add whatever disclosures users were shown, the internal approvals behind deployment, and any evaluation or testing that was done before launch. Logs frequently roll off on a short retention cycle, so suspending deletion is usually the first practical step once a dispute looks real.
Why this area is unsettled, and what that means
Courts are still working through these questions and the decisions so far do not all point the same direction, which means anyone offering a confident prediction is guessing. Regulators are moving at different speeds, and requirements differ by state and by industry, with some sectors already carrying obligations that have nothing to do with AI specifically but apply to it anyway. We will not tell you the law is settled where it is not. What a first conversation can establish is where your exposure sits today, what should be preserved before it disappears, and which contract terms are doing work you did not realize you had agreed to.
