Investigative reporter John Carreyrou of the New York Times filed a lawsuit against xAI, Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta and Perplexity on Monday for allegedly training their AI models on copyrighted books without permission. Carreyrou is perhaps for exposing the Theranos fraudulent blood test scandal.
According to , the lawsuit was filed alongside five other writers who all claim big tech companies have been violating their intellectual property rights in the name of building large language models.
This comes after a banner year for IP lawsuits against AI companies brought by rights holders. Just about every type of entity that deals in protected content has gone to court against AI companies this year, from movie studios like to papers like the . Some of these cases have led to settlements in the form of partnerships, such as the between Disney and OpenAI.
It’s notable that this case is being brought by a small group of individuals instead of as a class action, something the authors involved say is no accident. “LLM companies should not be able to so easily extinguish thousands upon thousands of high-value claims at bargain-basement rates,” the complaint reads. This is also the first case of its kind to list xAI as a defendant.
A spokesperson for Perplexity told Reuters that the company “doesn’t index books.” Anthropic, for its part, is no stranger to lawsuits from book publishers, having lawsuit brought by half a million authors for $1.5 billion. Apple was also amid similar allegations. This latest complaint mentions the Anthropic settlement specifically, saying that class members in that case will only receive “a tiny fraction (just 2 percent) of the Copyright Act’s statutory ceiling of $150,000.”
Engadget has reached out to xAI, Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta and Perplexity for comment and will update with any response.
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