A group of US reporters has sued several leading artificial intelligence companies, including the likes of OpenAI, Google , Elon Musk’s xAI, Anthropic, Meta Platforms, and Perplexity. The reason for this is allegedly using copyrighted books without consent to train their AI systems. The petitioners, including New York Times reporter John Carreyrou, filed the lawsuit on Monday.
New York Times reporter sues Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and others
John Carreyrou, the New York Times reporter and author of “Bad Blood,” filed the lawsuit in California federal court with five other writers. They accuse the AI companies of pirating their protected literary works to develop their large language models (LLMs) that power the companies’ AI chatbots. The companies haven’t secured licences or compensated authors.
“ This case concerns a straightforward and deliberate act of theft that constitutes copyright infringement ,” says the filing. This is one of the several copyright cases by authors and other copyright owners against the tech companies. However, this case is apparently the first to name xAI as a defendant.
The writers accuse AI companies used copyrighted books to train AI systems
As per the petitioners, the AI companies accessed pirated copies of books through shadow libraries, including LibGen, Z-Library, and OceanofPDF. These copies were allegedly embedded into AI systems to speed up their development. The lawsuit claimed the alleged infringement impacted hundreds of authors, including bestselling writers and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists.
Unlike other pending cases, the writers in this case are not pursuing a class-action route. This is a type of lawsuit that would favor defendants by allowing them to negotiate a single settlement. Instead, it wants individual claims assessed by a jury.
“ LLM companies should not be able to so easily extinguish thousands upon thousands of high-value claims at bargain-basement rates ,” the complaint said. The plaintiffs argue that existing class-action settlements don’t really reflect the scale of the alleged infringement.
Writers, in this case, are not pursuing a class-action route
Previously, Anthropic reached the first major settlement in an AI-training copyright case in August. It agreed to pay $1.5 billion to authors who claimed the company pirated millions of books. The new lawsuit opines that class members in that case will receive just 2%, which it describes as “a tiny fraction,” of the Copyright Act’s statutory ceiling of $150,000 per infringed work.
Meanwhile, AI firms argue that using copyrighted material to train AI models qualifies as fair use. This is as systems generate new and transformative outputs rather than reproducing original works. A US judge in an earlier case found that Anthropic’s use of copyrighted books for AI training amounted to fair use. However, it ruled that the company violated copyright law by storing millions of pirated books in a central database. This is regardless of whether they were used to train AI.
