John Carreyrou, the New York Times investigative reporter best known for exposing fraud at blood-testing startup Theranos, has filed a lawsuit against several leading artificial intelligence companies, accusing them of using copyrighted books without permission to train their chatbots.
Carreyrou and five other writers sued Elon Musk’s xAI, Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta Platforms and Perplexity on Monday in California federal court. The plaintiffs allege the companies pirated their books and fed them into large language models that power AI chatbots.
The case is part of a growing wave of copyright lawsuits brought by authors and other rights holders against technology companies over the data used to train AI systems. It is the first such suit to name xAI as a defendant.
Spokespeople for the companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Unlike some other cases, the plaintiffs are not seeking class-action status. They argue that class actions tend to favour defendants by allowing them to resolve thousands of claims through a single settlement.
“LLM companies should not be able to so easily extinguish thousands upon thousands of high-value claims at bargain-basement rates,” the complaint said.
The lawsuit follows a major settlement reached in August, when Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to resolve claims from a class of authors who said the company had pirated millions of books for AI training. The new complaint argues that authors in that settlement will receive “a tiny fraction (just 2%)” of the Copyright Act’s statutory maximum of $150,000 per infringed work.
Carreyrou’s case was filed by attorneys at Freedman Normand Friedland, including Kyle Roche — a lawyer whom Carreyrou himself profiled in a 2023 New York Times article.
At a November hearing in the Anthropic class action, U.S. District Judge William Alsup criticized a separate firm co-founded by Roche for encouraging authors to opt out of the settlement in pursuit of “a sweeter deal.” Roche declined to comment Monday.
Carreyrou later told the court that using stolen books to build AI systems was Anthropic’s “original sin” and said the settlement did not go far enough to address the alleged wrongdoing.
The lawsuit adds pressure on major AI developers as courts continue to weigh how copyright law applies to the rapidly expanding use of data to train artificial intelligence systems.