New York Times reporter files lawsuit against AI companies

Investigative journalist 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 is perhaps for exposing the Theranos fraudulent blood test scandal.

According to The lawsuit was filed alongside five other authors who all claim that big tech companies have violated their intellectual property rights in the name of creating large language models.

This comes after a record year for intellectual property lawsuits against AI companies brought by rights holders. Nearly every type of entity that deals with copyrighted content has filed lawsuits against AI companies this year, from movie studios like to newspapers like . Some of these cases resulted in settlements in the form of partnerships, such as that of between Disney and OpenAI.

It is worth noting that this case is being brought by a small group of individuals rather than through a class action, which the authors involved believe is no coincidence. “LLM companies should not be able to so easily extinguish thousands and thousands of high-value claims at rock-bottom rates,” the complaint states. This is also the first case of its kind in which xAI is named as a defendant.

A spokesperson for Perplexity said Reuters that the company “does not index books.” Anthropic, for its part, is no stranger to lawsuits from book publishers, having lawsuit filed by half a million authors for $1.5 billion. Apple was also amid similar allegations. This latest complaint specifically mentions the Anthropic settlement, claiming that class members in this case will receive only “a tiny fraction (only 2%) of the Copyright Act’s $150,000 statutory cap.”

Engadget has contacted xAI, Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta and Perplexity for comment and will update any response.