New York Times reporter sues Google, xAI and OpenAI over AI training on copyrighted books

Investigative journalist and New York Times reporter John Carreyrou has filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk’s xAI, Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta Platforms and Perplexity, accusing the companies of using copyrighted books without permission to train their artificial intelligence systems.

The suit was filed on Monday in a California federal court by Carreyrou, best known for exposing fraud at Silicon Valley blood-testing startup Theranos and for authoring the book Bad Blood, along with five other writers. The plaintiffs accused the AI firms of pirating their books and feeding them into large language models that power chatbots, Reuters reported.

The case adds to a growing list of copyright disputes brought by authors and other rights holders against technology companies over the use of creative works in AI training. It is also the first lawsuit to name xAI as a defendant, according to Reuters.

A spokesperson for Perplexity informed that the company does not index books.

Unlike several other pending cases, the writers are not seeking to form a class action. The complaint stated that class actions tend to favour defendants by allowing them to negotiate a single settlement with a large group of plaintiffs, effectively extinguishing numerous high-value claims at significantly reduced rates.

The filing comes months after Anthropic reached the first major settlement in an AI-training copyright dispute in August, agreeing to pay $1.5 billion to a class of authors who alleged that the company pirated millions of books. The new lawsuit stated that authors involved in that settlement would receive only a small fraction, around 2 per cent, of the Copyright Act’s statutory maximum of $150,000 per infringed work.

Monday’s complaint was filed by attorneys at Freedman Normand Friedland, including Kyle Roche, who was previously profiled by Carreyrou in a 2023 New York Times article. During a November hearing in the Anthropic class action, US District Judge William Alsup criticised a separate law firm co-founded by Roche for encouraging authors to opt out of the settlement in pursuit of improved terms, Reuters reported. Roche declined to comment on Monday.

At a later hearing, Carreyrou informed the judge that Anthropic’s alleged theft of books to build its AI systems amounted to the company’s original wrongdoing and stated that the settlement reached in that case did not go far enough.