John Carreyrou, the investigative journalist who exposed the Theranos fraud, has filed a lawsuit against several leading artificial intelligence companies, alleging they unlawfully used copyrighted books to train their AI systems without author consent, as per a report by Reuters.
The lawsuit, filed on Monday in a federal court in California, names xAI, Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta Platforms and Perplexity as defendants. Carreyrou, a New York Times reporter and author of the best-selling book Bad Blood, joined five other writers in accusing the companies of copying their works and incorporating them into large language models that power popular AI chatbots.
According to the complaint, the companies built and refined their AI systems by ingesting entire books without permission, depriving authors of control and compensation while generating massive commercial value. The suit marks the first time Elon Musk’s AI venture xAI has been named in a copyright case related to AI training.
Unlike other ongoing lawsuits in this space, the plaintiffs are pursuing individual claims rather than forming a class action. They argue that class actions often allow tech companies to negotiate broad settlements that significantly limit compensation for creators.
“AI developers should not be allowed to wipe out thousands of valuable copyright claims through deeply discounted, one-size-fits-all settlements,” the complaint states.
The case adds to a growing wave of legal challenges from...
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