An Alphabet shareholder has reportedly sued Google CEO Sundar Pichai, co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and 10 other directors and executives over the company’s AI training practices. The lawsuit, obtained by MBW, accuses Google of using copyrighted books, images, music and people’s voices to train its AI models without getting proper permission or paying copyright holders. It claims the company followed an ‘ask forgiveness not approval’ approach to avoid spending money on licences. Phil Rosen filed the 79-page complaint in a federal court in Chicago. The case has been filed on behalf of Alphabet, which means any damages recovered would go to the company, not Rosen.
The complaint alleges that all 13 defendants knew about the copyright violations but allowed the company to continue using copyrighted material. It also claims that Google chose to pay damages only after copyright owners filed lawsuits against it.
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Other defendants include Alphabet Chair John L. Hennessy, CFO Anat Ashkenazi, President Ruth M. Porat and Chief Legal Officer Kent Walker.
The lawsuit focuses on Google’s music AI models, including Lyria, Lyria 2, Lyria 3, Mulan and MusicLM, according to the report. It claims the company used millions of copyrighted music recordings, compositions and lyrics without permission.
According to the complaint, Google extracted audio from recordings, converted it into formats that AI systems could understand and divided it into smaller clips for training. It also allegedly removed copyright information identifying artists and their work.
The filing also reportedly claims that MusicLM, introduced in January 2023, was trained on five million audio clips covering around 280,000 hours of music.
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The complaint also accuses Google of using hundreds of thousands of hours of human speech recordings to build voice-based products such as Gemini Live. It claims this violated Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), which requires companies to inform people and obtain written permission before collecting biometric data.
The lawsuit asks the court to make the defendants pay damages to Alphabet, return their compensation and introduce stronger checks on copyright compliance. The complaint does not mention a specific damages amount.