A group of writers, including an investigative reporter for The New York Times, has filed a new copyright infringement suit against several larger-than-life artificial intelligence companies. The suit takes aim at Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta, Perplexity and Elon Musk-owned xAI in what is the first time xAI has been named in a lawsuit of this kind. The suit was filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California.
Plaintiffs and Reasons They Sued Separately
The plaintiffs include John Carreyrou, a New York Times reporter who helped expose fraud at Theranos. Earlier this year he and five other authors sued Anthropic but decided to opt out of the class-action settlement. That case resulted in a reported $1.5 billion settlement, but individual authors got approximately $3,000 each.
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This time, the authors decided to file their complaint individually rather than on behalf of a class. The ruling seems to stem from previous settlement dissatisfaction and the call for better pay and transparency.
Allegations Against AI Companies
The suit claims that the AI companies referred to in it illegally used copyrighted books to train their large language models without authorisation or a licence. The companies have been accused of downloading pirated copies of books from shadow libraries, including LibGen, Z-Library and OceanofPDF, the complaint said.
These works, the authors allege, were copied and scrutinised and included in AI training pipelines for faster production time and a running start at the race to achieve superior generative AI. The complaint characterises the practice as a “deliberate act of theft” and not mere or accidental use.
xAI: First Time AI is Named in Copyright Litigation
This is the first copyright violation lawsuit that specifically names xAI as a defendant, reports Reuters. Among other companies named in the lawsuit were OpenAI, Google, Meta and Anthropic, which are all facing multiple lawsuits on similar grounds.
Perplexity has denied the allegation, saying it does not index books. At filing time, the other defendants had not made public statements about the case.
What the Authors Are Seeking
The lawsuit, filed yesterday in a California-based U.S. District Court, demands a jury trial and statutory damages from the plaintiffs. They are also seeking an accounting of which copyrighted works each company allegedly used to train their AI models.
With copyright fights over AIs’ training data heating up, this case piles even more pressure on AI companies to explain how their models are trained and if current practices can stand up to legal scrutiny.