NEW YORK CITY, New York: An investigative journalist has sued Elon Musk's xAI, Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta Platforms, and Perplexity this week for using copyrighted books without permission to train their artificial intelligence systems.
He had earlier exposed fraud at the blood-testing startup Theranos.
New York Times reporter and "Bad Blood" author John Carreyrou filed the lawsuit in California federal court with five other writers. They accused the AI companies of pirating their books and feeding them into the large language models (LLMs) that power the companies' chatbots.
The lawsuit is another of several copyright cases brought by authors and other copyright owners who have accused tech companies of using their work in AI training. This is the first time xAI has been named as a defendant.
Spokespeople for the defendants did not respond right away to requests for comment on the lawsuit.
Unlike other similar cases, the writers are not seeking to bring a class-action lawsuit.
In August, Anthropic reached the first significant settlement in a copyright dispute over AI training. The company agreed to pay US$1.5 billion to a group of authors who said Anthropic copied millions of books without permission.
The new lawsuit says that authors in that settlement will receive only a small amount — about two percent of the maximum $150,000 allowed under copyright law for each work that was infringed.
The complaint filed on December 22 was brought by lawyers from the firm Freedman Normand Friedland, including Kyle Roche. Journalist John Carreyrou profiled Roche in a 2023 New York Times article.
At a November court hearing in the Anthropic class action case, U.S. District Judge William Alsup criticised Roche. He said the firm had encouraged authors to leave the settlement in hopes of getting a better deal. Roche declined to comment on December 22.
Carreyrou told the judge that Anthropic's decision to use stolen books to build its AI was the company's "original sin" and that the settlement did not go far enough.
