Authors including Carreyrou sue OpenAI, Google, Meta and others for unauthorized book training
Authors including New York Times reporter John Carreyrou sued OpenAI, Google, Meta, xAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity, alleging the companies used their copyrighted books without permission to train large language models. Unlike other pending cases, the authors opted out of a class action structure, arguing that settlements in such cases unfairly undervalue individual copyright claims.
What happened
John Carreyrou, an investigative journalist known for exposing Theranos fraud, along with five other writers, filed a lawsuit in California federal court alleging that OpenAI, Google, Meta, xAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity used copyrighted books without permission to train their large language models.
The authors deliberately chose not to pursue a class action, arguing that such settlements undervalue individual copyright claims by allowing defendants to negotiate a single settlement with many plaintiffs at "bargain-basement rates."
Reported impact
The lawsuit claims the AI companies pirated the authors' books and fed them into the large language models powering their chatbots.
Index analysis
This is one of several copyright cases brought by authors against tech companies over AI training data use. Anthropic reached a settlement in August offering $1.5 billion to a class of authors, with class members receiving approximately 2% of the Copyright Act's statutory ceiling of $150,000 per infringed work according to the complaint.
Classification
Sources and evidence
This record was researched and written by the Index, based on the following original reporting.