John Carreyrou and Other Authors Bring New Lawsuit Against Six Major AI Companies

A group of writers, including Theranos whistleblower and Bad Blood author John Carreyrou, is filing a lawsuit against Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta, xAI, and Perplexity, alleging the companies trained their models on pirated copies of their books.

This lawsuit follows a similar case in which another set of authors filed a class action against Anthropic on the same allegations of copyright infringement. In that case, a judge ruled that while it was legal for Anthropic and other AI companies to train their models on pirated books, it was not legal to pirate the books in the first place.

Eligible writers can receive around $3,000 from the $1.5 billion Anthropic settlement, but some authors have expressed dissatisfaction with that resolution. The settlement doesn't hold AI companies accountable for using stolen books to train their models, which generate billions in revenue.

According to the new lawsuit, the plaintiffs argue that the proposed Anthropic settlement "seems to serve [the AI companies], not creators."

"L" M 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 actual cost of their massive willful infringement," he lawsuit states.