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An investigative journalist renowned for exposing fraud at Silicon Valley’s Theranos blood-testing startup has filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk’s xAI, Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta Platforms, and Perplexity. The lawsuit accuses these companies of illegally using copyrighted books to train their AI systems without permission.
John Carreyrou, a reporter for The New York Times and author of “Bad Blood,” filed the case in a federal court in California alongside five other authors. They allege that the AI companies have pirated their books and incorporated them into large language models (LLMs) that power their chatbots.
This lawsuit is one of several copyright infringement cases brought by authors and rights holders against tech firms over the use of their works in AI training. It marks the first time xAI has been named as a defendant in such a case.
Representatives for the companies involved have not responded to requests for comment at this time.
Unlike some other legal actions, the authors are not seeking to organize a class action. They argue that class actions tend to favor defendants, allowing them to settle many claims with a single, potentially less favorable, deal.
“The companies developing LLMs shouldn’t be allowed to dismiss thousands of valuable claims at bargain prices,” the complaint states.
Anthropic reached a significant settlement in a related copyright dispute in August, agreeing to pay $1.5 billion to a group of authors whose millions of books were allegedly pirated.
The new lawsuit claims that the authors involved in that case will receive only a tiny portion—about 2%—of the maximum statutory damages available under the Copyright Act, which is $150,000 per disputed work.
The lawsuit was filed by attorneys from the law firm Freedman Normand Friedland, including Kyle Roche, who was featured in a 2023 New York Times profile by Carreyrou.
In a November hearing related to the Anthropic case, U.S. District Judge William Alsup criticized a law firm co-founded by Roche for trying to find a “sweeter deal” by encouraging authors to opt out of the settlement. Roche declined to comment on Monday.
Carreyrou later told the judge that the act of stealing books to develop AI was Anthropic’s “original sin,” and he felt the settlement did not go far enough to address the issue.
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