Investigative reporter John Carreyrou from New York Times on Monday filed a lawsuit against xAI, Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta and Perplexity for allegedly training their AI models on copyrighted books without permission. Carreyrou, perhaps for exposing the Theranos fake blood test scandal.
According to The lawsuit was filed along with five other authors who claim that big tech companies are violating their intellectual property rights in the name of creating large language models.
This comes after a banner year for intellectual property lawsuits against artificial intelligence companies brought by copyright holders. This year, nearly every protected content entity has filed lawsuits against artificial intelligence companies from film studios such as to such papers as . Some of these cases resulted in partnership settlements, e.g. between Disney and OpenAI.
It is noteworthy that this case was brought by a small group of individuals, and not as a class action, which, according to the authors, is not accidental. “LLM companies should not be able to so easily pay off thousands upon thousands of costly claims at reduced rates,” the complaint states. This is also the first case of its kind in which xAI is named as a defendant.
This was announced by a Perplexity representative. Reuters that the company “does not index books.” Anthropic, for its part, is no stranger to lawsuits from book publishers. a lawsuit brought by half a million authors for $1.5 billion. Apple was also amid similar accusations. This latest complaint specifically mentions the anthropic agreement, saying that group members would then receive only “a small portion (just 2 percent) of the Copyright Act's $150,000 cap.”
Engadget has reached out to xAI, Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta and Perplexity for comment and will update with any response.
