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, are filing a lawsuit against Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta, xAI and Perplexity, accusing the companies of training their models on pirated copies of their books.

If this sounds familiar, that’s because another group of authors has already filed a class action lawsuit against Anthropic for the same copyright violations. In that case the judge ruled that it was legal for Anthropic and similar AI companies to train on pirated copies of books, but it wasn’t legal to pirate the books in the first place.

While eligible writers could receive approximately $3,000 from the $1.5 billion Anthropic settlement, some authors were not. dissatisfied with that resolution – it doesn’t hold AI companies accountable for the actual act of using stolen books to train their models, which billions of dollars of the income.

According to the new lawsuit, the plaintiffs say the proposed anthropic settlement “appears to serve [the AI companies]not creators.”

“LLM companies should not be able to so easily defeat thousands upon thousands of high-value claims at low rates, thereby avoiding the true costs of their massive intentional infringement,” the lawsuit said.