A Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter whose work helped bring down Theranos is now taking on Silicon Valley’s biggest AI players — accusing them of looting his books to build billion-dollar chatbots.
John Carreyrou, the journalist behind the Wall Street Journal’s exposé of disgraced blood-testing startup Theranos, sued six major artificial intelligence companies Monday in California federal court, alleging they illegally used copyrighted books to train their AI systems.
Carreyrou, author of the bestselling tome “Bad Blood,” filed one single lawsuit alongside five other writers against Google, Elon Musk’s xAI, OpenAI, Meta Platforms, Anthropic and Perplexity.
The complaint accuses the companies of pirating books and feeding them into large language models that power popular chatbots — without permission or compensation.
The case marks the first copyright lawsuit to name xAI as a defendant, expanding a growing legal assault by authors and publishers over how artificial intelligence systems are trained.
Carreyrou, who’s now at the New York Times, and the other plaintiffs argue that the AI industry has built its core technology on stolen intellectual property, drawing massive investments and reaping profits while creators receive nothing.
A spokesperson for Perplexity said the company “doesn’t index books.”
The other defendants did not immediately respond to requests for comment, according to Reuters. The Post has reached out to them.
The lawsuit comes amid a wave of copyright cases targeting AI developers for scraping text, images and other works from the internet to train their models.
Unlike other high-profile cases, Carreyrou and the other authors are deliberately steering clear of a class-action lawsuit, which would bundle claims together and allow companies to negotiate a single settlement.
The writers say class actions favor defendants by limiting their exposure.
“LLM companies should not be able to so easily extinguish thousands upon thousands of high-value claims at bargain-basement rates,” the complaint states.
The filing takes direct aim at a recent settlement in which Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by authors who alleged the company pirated millions of books for AI training.
Carreyrou and his fellow plaintiffs opted out of that deal, arguing it dramatically undervalued authors’ rights.
According to the new complaint, class members in the Anthropic settlement will receive “a tiny fraction (just 2%) of the Copyright Act’s statutory ceiling of $150,000” per infringed work.
The writers say that outcome illustrates why class actions fail to hold AI companies accountable.
Carreyrou has previously blasted Anthropic’s conduct in court, calling the company’s use of pirated books its “original sin” and arguing the settlement did not go far enough to deter future misconduct.
Monday’s lawsuit was filed by attorneys at Freedman Normand Friedland, including Kyle Roche — a lawyer whom Carreyrou profiled in a 2023 New York Times article.
During a November hearing in the Anthropic class action, US District Judge William Alsup criticized a separate law firm co-founded by Roche for organizing authors to eschew the settlement in favor of what the judge described as “a sweeter deal.”
Roche declined to comment Monday, according to Reuters.
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