A journalist from The New York Times, known for uncovering the Theranos scandal, has filed a copyright lawsuit against several major AI companies, alleging that they used copyrighted books without permission to train their artificial intelligence models. For the unversed, the lawsuit was filed in California federal court, naming Elon Musk’s xAI, OpenAI, Google, Meta Platforms, Anthropic and AI search startup Perplexity as defendants.
Carreyrou, a New York Times reporter and author of Bad Blood, filed the lawsuit alongside five other writers, accusing the companies of illegally copying and using their books to create large language models that power popular chatbots.
According to the complaint, the authors claim that their work was “pirated” and used in AI training datasets without their permission or compensation. The case adds to a growing list of legal challenges for AI firms, as authors, publishers, and other rights holders object to how copyrighted material is used to create generative AI systems. Notably, this is the first known copyright lawsuit that directly targets Musk-backed xAI.
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Unlike in some previous cases, the plaintiffs are not seeking class action status. The authors contend that class actions benefit technology companies by allowing them to settle multiple claims at once for relatively low sums, rather than addressing individual infringements in full.
A spokesperson for Perplexity stated that the company does not index or use books for training. Other defendants had not provided public responses at the time of filing.
The lawsuit also draws attention to a recent settlement in which Anthropic settled a class-action lawsuit brought by authors regarding AI training practices by agreeing to pay $1.5 billion in August. Carreyrou and the other plaintiffs contend that these settlements do not sufficiently address the extent of alleged copyright violations and do not adequately compensate creators.