Authors Sue AI Companies for Copyright Infringement

A federal lawsuit filed by investigative journalist John Carreyrou and five other authors accuses major artificial intelligence companies of copyright infringement for using pirated copies of their books to train AI models. The complaint, lodged on December 22, 2025, in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, targets Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta Platforms, xAI, and Perplexity.

Carreyrou, a New York Times reporter known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning investigation into the Theranos fraud and his book "Bad Blood," joined the suit alongside other writers who claim the defendants systematically incorporated unauthorized versions of their works into the datasets powering large language models. These models, which generate human-like text for chatbots and other applications, allegedly benefited from the plaintiffs' intellectual property without licenses or compensation. The authors contend that this practice constitutes deliberate theft, enabling the companies to develop competitive tools that now rival traditional content creation.

Unlike previous cases, the plaintiffs opted against a class action, arguing it allows defendants to settle en masse at reduced...