San Francisco, 23 December (H.S.): Investigative journalist John Carreyrou, renowned for his New York Times exposé and bestselling book Bad Blood on the Theranos scandal, filed a federal lawsuit on Monday in California against Elon Musk's xAI, OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Meta Platforms, and Perplexity, accusing the AI giants of systematically pirating copyrighted books—including his own—to train large language models powering their chatbots.
Joined by five fellow authors, Carreyrou's complaint alleges these firms scraped millions of works from illicit datasets without permission or compensation, marking the first legal action naming xAI as a defendant amid a surge of creator-led challenges to AI training practices.
The plaintiffs contend that defendants ingested their books into LLMs via shadow libraries like Books3, enabling generative AI to regurgitate summaries, excerpts, and stylistic imitations that erode market value for original works.
Carreyrou's suit explicitly rejects class-action structures, which it decries as favoring corporations by consolidating claims into lowball settlements, insisting individual actions better secure the Copyright Act's statutory maximum of $150,000 per infringed work.
Defendants have yet to respond publicly, though the case echoes broader litigation where courts increasingly question fair use defenses for commercial AI datasets.
Filed by attorneys at Freedman Normand Friedland—including Kyle Roche, whom Carreyrou profiled in 2023—the action critiques Anthropic's August $1.5 billion class-action resolution with authors, where claimants reportedly receive just 2% of statutory caps after dilution across thousands.
Carreyrou previously testified that Anthropic's book-scraping constituted an original sin, urging higher accountability during November hearings before Judge William Alsup, who rebuked Roche's firm for soliciting opt-outs seeking superior terms.
Anthropic pledged to purge offending datasets and pay roughly $3,000 per book plus interest, hailed by plaintiffs' counsel as history's largest copyright recovery pending approval.
This suit joins a phalanx of actions by authors, artists, and media outlets against tech behemoths, testing whether transformative AI use excuses unlicensed ingestion amid San Francisco rulings deeming it unlawful in many situations.
Roche's prior ventures drew judicial scrutiny for aggressive opt-out campaigns, yet Carreyrou champions the strategy to thwart bargain-basement resolutions extinguishing high-value claims.
As AI firms race to dominate chatbots like Grok, ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, creators demand licensing deals or injunctions to safeguard intellectual property fueling the multibillion-dollar sector.
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Hindusthan Samachar / Jun Sarkar
