Investigative reporter John Carreyrou, known for exposing Theranos, has filed a lawsuit against major artificial intelligence (AI) industry players, including Elon Musk’s xAI, Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta platforms, and Perplexity.
The New York Times reporter accused the companies of using copyrighted books without permission to train their AI systems.
Carreyrou, author of Bad Blood and a New York Times reporter, filed the suit in a California federal court along with five other authors.
As per the claim, their books were used to feed large language models (LLMs), aiming to power their AI chatbots.
Unlike other ongoing cases, the authors are currently not looking to join a larger class-action lawsuit.
They argued that such settlements favor defendants by allowing a deal by resolving numerous plaintiffs’ claims via one deal.
The development comes after Anthropic reached a $1.5 billion settlement in August with authors who accused the company for illegal use of books.
Carreyrou told the U.S. District Judge William Alsup said that the use of books to train Anthropic’s AI was “original sin” and that prior settlements did not go far enough.
Furthermore, he criticized the law firms for prioritising their own profits over fair competition to authors.
Notably, it marks the involvement of xAI for the first time in such a copyright dispute after its launch, emphasising increasing legal scrutiny over the use of copyrighted content in AI training.
