John Carreyrou, the Pulitzer winner who exposed Theranos, filed a copyright lawsuit on December 22 against OpenAI, Google, Meta, Anthropic, Perplexity, and xAI for allegedly training their models on pirated books. The catch, though, is that he and five co-plaintiffs deliberately avoided class-action status, positioning themselves to claim up to $150,000 per infringed work instead of accepting the pennies-on-the-dollar settlements that have become standard in AI copyright disputes.
The math is brutal for defendants. When Anthropic settled a similar class action in August for $1.5 billion, authors received roughly $3,000 per work, just 2% of the statutory maximum. If Carreyrou’s strategy succeeds and other authors follow suit, AI companies could face billions in individual judgments across thousands of copyrighted works.
Carreyrou made his position clear during November court hearings, calling pirated training data Anthropic’s “original sin” and rejecting the August settlement entirely.
The complaint explicitly argues that “LLM companies should not be able to so easily extinguish thousands upon thousands of high-value claims at bargain-basement rates.” It’s a direct challenge to the class-action playbook that has allowed AI companies to resolve mass infringement claims cheaply.
The five other plaintiffs—Lisa Barretta, Philip Shishkin, Jane Adams, Mathew Sacks, and Michael Kochin—join Carreyrou in betting that individual lawsuits will force better compensation than...
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