OpenAI, xAI and Google are facing a new lawsuit from journalists alleging commercial AI models were trained on pirated books.
A group of US journalists and writers has sued leading artificial intelligence companies, including OpenAI, Elon Musk’s xAI, Google, Anthropic, Meta Platforms and AI search startup Perplexity, over the alleged use of pirated books to train commercial large language models.
The lawsuit was filed by John Carreyrou, a New York Times reporter and investigative journalist known for exposing fraud at Theranos, along with three other writers. It was submitted on Monday (local time) in a federal court in California.
At the core of the complaint is an allegation of deliberate copyright infringement. The filing states: “This case concerns a straightforward and deliberate act of theft that constitutes copyright infringement.” It further alleges that the companies “illegally copied vast quantities of copyrighted books without permission and then used those stolen copies to build and train their commercial large language models.” According to the complaint, “The Copyright Act prohibits exactly this conduct.”
The defendants are accused of sourcing books from shadow libraries such as LibGen, Z-Library and OceanofPDF, which were allegedly reproduced, analysed, re-copied and embedded into AI systems to accelerate commercial development. The lawsuit claims the alleged infringement affects hundreds of authors, including bestselling writers and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists.
This is the first copyright lawsuit to formally name xAI as a defendant. The plaintiffs have rejected a class-action approach, arguing such settlements undervalue author losses. “LLM companies should not be able to so easily extinguish thousands upon thousands of high-value claims at bargain-basement rates,” the filing states.
The case intensifies scrutiny of closed, proprietary AI models trained on non-transparent datasets, potentially pushing the industry towards licensed, open-access and verifiably open source data practices.
