John Carreyrou, the New York Times reporter famed for uncovering fraud at Silicon Valley blood-testing firm Theranos and author of Bad Blood, filed a lawsuit on Monday against Elon Musk’s xAI, Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta Platforms, and Perplexity. He accuses them of illegally using copyrighted books to train their AI chatbots.
Carreyrou joined four other writers in the California federal court suit, alleging the companies pirated their works to fuel large language models (LLMs). This marks the first case naming xAI as a defendant amid a wave of copyright lawsuits by authors against AI firms. Defendants’ spokespeople didn’t immediately comment.
Unlike prior class actions—which plaintiffs say let companies settle cheaply with masses of claimants—this suit avoids grouping to preserve individual leverage. “LLM companies shouldn’t extinguish thousands of high-value claims at bargain rates,” the complaint states.
Anthropic settled a similar class action in August for $1.5 billion, but plaintiffs here note class members get just 2% of the Copyright Act’s $150,000 statutory maximum per work.
Filed by Freedman Normand Friedland (including attorney Kyle Roche, profiled by Carreyrou in 2023), the case follows Roche’s firm’s push for authors to opt out of the Anthropic deal seeking better terms. US District Judge William Alsup criticized that effort in November; Carreyrou later called Anthropic’s book theft its “original sin,” deeming the settlement insufficient.
