Investigative journalist and The New York Times reporter John Carreyrou, best known for exposing fraud at Theranos, has sued several major artificial intelligence companies for allegedly using copyrighted books without permission to train their AI systems.
Carreyrou, the author of Bad Blood, filed the lawsuit on Monday in California federal court alongside five other writers. The defendants include xAI, Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta Platforms and Perplexity. The complaint accuses the companies of pirating books and ingesting them into large language models that power chatbots.
The lawsuit adds to a growing wave of copyright litigation brought by authors, publishers and other rights holders against AI developers. It is the first such case to name xAI, the artificial intelligence company founded by Elon Musk, as a defendant.
Unlike several other lawsuits, Carreyrou and his co-plaintiffs are not seeking class-action status. The complaint argues that class actions tend to benefit defendants by allowing them to negotiate a single settlement that resolves thousands of claims at once. “LLM companies should not be able to so easily extinguish thousands upon thousands of high-value claims at bargain-basement rates,” the filing said.
A spokesperson for Perplexity said the company “doesn’t index books.” Representatives for the other defendants did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The case comes months after Anthropic agreed in August to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit alleging it pirated millions of books for AI training. Carreyrou has publicly criticized that settlement, arguing it failed to adequately compensate authors. According to the new complaint, authors in that case will receive only about 2% of the Copyright Act’s statutory maximum of $150,000 per infringed work.
The lawsuit was filed by attorneys at Freedman Normand Friedland, including lawyer Kyle Roche, whom Carreyrou previously profiled in a 2023 article. During a November hearing related to the Anthropic settlement, U.S. District Judge William Alsup criticized a separate firm co-founded by Roche for encouraging authors to opt out of the deal in pursuit of better terms.
At a later hearing, Carreyrou described the alleged use of pirated books to build AI systems as Anthropic’s “original sin,” saying the settlement did not go far enough to address the harm to writers.
