Authors including John Carreyrou sue six major AI companies

A group of writers — including Theranos whistleblower and “Bad Blood” author John Carreyrou — has filed a lawsuit against Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta, xAI, and Perplexity, accusing the six companies of training their AI models on pirated copies of the authors’ books.

The case follows an earlier class action against Anthropic over the same alleged conduct. In that case, a judge ruled it was legal for Anthropic and similar AI companies to train on pirated copies of books, but that pirating the books in the first place was not legal.

Under the settlement Anthropic proposed in that earlier case, eligible writers can receive about $3,000 each from a $1.5 billion fund. Some authors are dissatisfied with that resolution, arguing it doesn’t hold AI companies accountable for the act of using stolen books to train models that generate billions of dollars in revenue.

The new lawsuit says the proposed Anthropic settlement “seems to serve [the AI companies], not creators.” The plaintiffs argue the settlement lets AI companies avoid the true cost of the infringement: “LLM companies should not be able to so easily extinguish thousands upon thousands of high-value claims at bargain-basement rates, eliding what should be the true cost of their massive willful infringement,” the lawsuit states.

Why it matters

The suit signals that authors are pushing past settlements and toward direct compensation tied to the revenue AI models generate from their work, a fight that could shape how AI companies license copyrighted material going forward.