The tech giants are once again embroiled in a new lawsuit, this time filed by investigative reporter John Carreyrou, best known for exposing fraud at the Silicon Valley blood-testing startup Theranos. Carreyrou, along with five other authors, is suing Elon Musk's xAI, Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta Platforms, and Perplexity for allegedly using copyrighted books without permission to train their AI systems.
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The lawsuit, filed in California federal court, accuses these companies of pirating authors' works and feeding them into the large language models (LLMs) that drive their chatbots.
The lawsuit is among multiple copyright cases initiated by authors and other copyright holders against technology firms concerning the utilization of their work in AI training. This case is the first to list xAI as a defendant. Representatives for the defendants have not yet provided comments regarding the lawsuit.
In contrast to other ongoing cases, the writers are opting not to unite in a larger class action lawsuit, which they argue benefits defendants by enabling them to settle with numerous plaintiffs through a single agreement.
"LLM companies should not be able to so easily extinguish thousands upon thousands of high-value claims at bargain-basement rates," the complaint said.
On Monday, a complaint was submitted by lawyers from the firm Freedman Normand Friedland, among them Kyle Roche, who was featured in a 2023 New York Times article by Carreyrou.
In August, Anthropic settled the first major AI-training copyright dispute, agreeing to pay $1.5 billion to authors who claimed the company pirated millions of books. However, the new lawsuit argues that class members will only receive "a tiny fraction" (2%) of the potential $150,000 per infringed work under the Copyright Act.
During a November hearing, Judge William Alsup criticized a law firm co-founded by Roche for encouraging authors to opt out of the settlement for a better deal. Carreyrou later called Anthropic’s use of pirated books the company's “original sin” and argued the settlement didn’t go far enough.