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 set of authors already filed a class action suit against Anthropic for these same acts of copyright infringement. In that case, 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.
While eligible writers can receive about $3,000 from the $1.5 billion Anthropic settlement, some authors were dissatisfied with that resolution — it doesn’t hold AI companies accountable for the actual act of using stolen books to train their models, which generate billions of dollars in revenue.
According to the new lawsuit, the plaintiffs say that the proposed Anthropic settlement “seems to serve [the AI companies], not creators.”
“LLM companies should not be able to so easily extinguish thousands upon thousands of high-value claims at bargain-basement rates, eliding what should be the true cost of their massive willful infringement,” the lawsuit says.
