Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist John Carreyrou and five other authors have filed a new copyright infringement lawsuit against six major AI companies: OpenAI, Google, Meta, Anthropic, Perplexity, and Elon Musk's xAI. The suit, filed in a California federal court, alleges that these firms used pirated copies of the authors' books to train their large language models without permission or compensation.
Notably, the plaintiffs are pursuing individual claims rather than a class-action lawsuit. They argue that class-action settlements, such as a recent $1.5 billion deal involving Anthropic, provide authors with only a small fraction of the potential statutory damages for copyright infringement and allow tech companies to resolve high-value claims at "bargain-basement rates." This legal action marks the first time xAI has been named as a defendant in such a case.