Prominent Authors Sue Six AI Giants Over Alleged Book Piracy
A group of writers led by John Carreyrou files a new copyright lawsuit against major AI companies, arguing that recent settlements let tech firms off too easily. The plaintiffs demand fair compensation for the use of their pirated books in training lucrative AI models.
A group of prominent writers, including "Bad Blood" author John Carreyrou, is filing a new lawsuit against Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta, xAI, and Perplexity. The authors accuse these major AI companies of training their large language models on pirated copies of their books. This legal action follows a previous class action suit against Anthropic over similar copyright infringement claims.
The new complaint stems from dissatisfaction with a recent $1.5 billion Anthropic settlement, which offers eligible writers about $3,000 each. The plaintiffs argue that this resolution fails to hold AI companies accountable for using stolen books to train models that generate billions of dollars in revenue. They state that the proposed settlement seems to serve the AI companies rather than the creators.
According to the lawsuit, LLM companies should not be able to extinguish thousands of high-value claims at extremely low rates. The authors contend that the settlement elides the true cost of what they describe as massive, willful infringement by the tech industry. They seek to ensure that writers receive fair compensation for the central role their work plays in building these profitable AI systems.