A prominent group of authors, spearheaded by John Carreyrou, the investigative journalist behind "Bad Blood," has launched a new lawsuit against six major artificial intelligence companies: Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta, xAI, and Perplexity. The lawsuit alleges that these AI giants unlawfully trained their large language models (LLMs) using pirated copies of the authors' copyrighted books. This legal action comes as a direct rejection of a previous class-action settlement with Anthropic, which many writers deemed inadequate.
This isn't the first time AI companies have faced such accusations. A separate group of authors previously filed a class-action suit against Anthropic for similar copyright infringement claims. In that instance, a judge ruled that while it was legal for Anthropic and other AI firms to train their models on pirated books, the act of pirating the books in the first place remained illegal.
Despite a $1.5 billion settlement from Anthropic, which offered eligible writers approximately $3,000 each, many authors expressed deep dissatisfaction with the resolution. Critics argued that the settlement failed to hold AI companies truly accountable for the fundamental act of utilizing stolen intellectual property to train models that now generate billions of dollars in revenue.
According to the new lawsuit, the plaintiffs contend that the proposed Anthropic settlement "seems to serve [the AI companies], not creators." They further argue:
LLM companies should not be able to so easily extinguish thousands upon thousands of high-value claims at bargain-basement rates, eliding what should be the true cost of their massive willful infringement.
