John Carreyrou and other authors file new lawsuit against six major AI companies

A group of writers, including Theranos whistleblower and “Bad Blood” author John Carreyrou, is 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, it’s because another group of authors has already filed a class-action lawsuit against Anthropic for these same acts of copyright infringement. In this case, the the judge ruled that it was legal for Anthropic and similar AI companies to train on pirated copies of books, but that it was not legal to pirate the books in the first place.

Although eligible writers could receive about $3,000 from the $1.5 billion Anthropic settlement, some authors have been unhappy with this resolution – it does not hold AI companies accountable for the actual act of using stolen books to train their models, which generates billions of dollars in income.

According to the new lawsuit, the plaintiffs claim that Anthropic’s proposed settlement “appears to serve [the AI companies]not the creators.

“The LLM Companies should not be able to so easily extinguish thousands and thousands of high-value claims at rock bottom rates, thereby ignoring what should be the true cost of their massive willful infringement,” the lawsuit states.