A US federal judge has ruled that T.I.'s company, Grand Hustle LLC, must face a copyright lawsuit brought by veteran hip-hop producer Sir Jinx over the 2016 Dr. Dre collaboration "Dope." Judge Sherilyn Peace Garnett rejected the company's bid to dismiss the case, finding it too early to determine whether Jinx had granted implied approval for the song's release, and also allowed a related breach-of-contract claim to proceed. The ruling does not decide the case outright but sends it into discovery and potentially towards trial.

Jinx, Dre's cousin who first made his name with Ice Cube's group C.I.A. in the 1980s, is credited as a producer on "Dope" but claims Grand Hustle never obtained his consent before releasing it. This is his third attempt at litigation after a 2023 state case and an earlier federal case were both unsuccessful; the latest filing reframes his claim, arguing the track was an independent copyrighted work exploited commercially without any signed agreement. T.I.'s lawyers dismissed this as an "eleventh-hour pivot," pointing to earlier filings in which Jinx allegedly admitted cooperating with the release, and argued T.I. himself, as a co-author, had authority to approve it. "Dope," which featured Dre but was ultimately left off T.I.'s 2018 album Dime Trap, has since amassed more than 19 million YouTube views.