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. They accuse these companies of training their artificial intelligence models on pirated copies of their books.
This situation sounds familiar because another set of authors previously filed a class action suit against Anthropic for the same alleged copyright infringement. In that earlier case, the judge ruled that it was legal for Anthropic and similar AI companies to train their models on pirated books, but that it was not legal to pirate the books in the first place.
While eligible writers can receive about $3,000 each from the resulting $1.5 billion Anthropic settlement, many authors were dissatisfied with that resolution. They argue it does not hold AI companies accountable for the actual act of using stolen books to train their models, systems which now generate billions of dollars in revenue.
According to the new lawsuit, the plaintiffs state that the proposed Anthropic settlement seems to serve the AI companies, not the creators. The lawsuit argues that AI companies should not be able to so easily extinguish thousands of high-value claims at bargain-basement rates, avoiding what should be the true cost of their massive willful infringement.