Authors Sue AI Giants Over Alleged Copyrighted Book Use
Investigative journalist John Carreyrou of The New York Times has filed a lawsuit against Google, OpenAI, xAI, Anthropic, Meta Platforms, and Perplexity, alleging the companies used copyrighted books without permission to train artificial intelligence systems.
The case was filed in a federal court in California, with five other authors joining Carreyrou as plaintiffs, according to Reuters.
The lawsuit claims that the tech firms pirated authors’ books to train large language models (LLMs), which form the backbone of their chatbot products. Carreyrou—widely known for exposing the Theranos scandal and authoring the book Bad Blood—argued that such use constitutes a clear violation of copyright law.
This marks the first copyright lawsuit against xAI. Unlike several similar cases, the plaintiffs did not file the case as a class action, saying class actions often lead to the resolution of large numbers of claims with relatively low compensation.
Perplexity stated that it does not index books, while the other companies named in the lawsuit declined to comment immediately.
DBTech/BMT/OR
