Pulitzer-winning journalist and Theranos exposer John Carreyrou has joined five other authors in a high‑stakes copyright showdown against six of the biggest names in artificial intelligence, alleging that the industry has been quietly built on pirated books. The new lawsuit, filed in US federal court, explicitly targets Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, xAI and Perplexity AI for allegedly copying authors’ works from shadow libraries to train their large language models without permission, payment or licensing.
A new front in the AI–books battle
At the heart of the complaint is a simple allegation with sweeping implications: that today’s most prominent AI systems were trained on large troves of copyrighted books obtained from well‑known pirate repositories such as Library Genesis and similar “shadow libraries.” The plaintiffs argue that this mass ingestion of long‑form books was not incidental, but deliberate and repeated, because publishers’ and authors’ works were seen inside these companies as especially valuable training data for powerful, commercially viable models.
In court filings and public commentary around related cases, authors and their advocates have characterized this as a willful, industrial‑scale infringement—more akin to building a product line on an unlicensed catalogue than to the casual copying of a handful of files. The suit points out that the allegedly copied works now underpin AI products collectively valued in the tens of billions of dollars, including Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Meta’s Llama, xAI’s Grok and Perplexity AI’s eponymous assistant.
Rejecting Anthropic’s $1.5bn settlement
This new filing lands just months after Anthropic agreed to a headline‑grabbing 1.5 billion‑dollar settlement to resolve a class action brought by authors over the company’s use of pirated books in training. Under that deal, industry analyses estimate that authors whose books qualified for the class will receive roughly 3,000 dollars per work across an estimated 500,000 titles, a fraction of the maximum statutory damages of up to 150,000 dollars per infringed work that US law can provide in willful infringement cases.
The authors behind today’s complaint have deliberately opted out of that settlement, describing it as a “bargain‑basement” resolution to hundreds of thousands of high‑value claims. Their strategy is to pursue individual actions instead of class‑wide relief, arguing that the flat per‑book payout dramatically undervalues the years of reporting, research and writing that went into their work and fails to reflect how central those books allegedly are to the AI systems’ capabilities.
As the tipster who alerted this newsroom to the filing, Laura Zion, a communications coordinator at the strategic communications firm JConnelly, frames the stakes bluntly: “This lawsuit brings the debate over AI training models and the rights of creatives into focus and has the potential to shape the next phase of AI copyright law. The case underscores broader questions around ethical AI training, transparency, and fair compensation for creators,” she wrote in an email sharing the complaint. Zion should be credited as a source for flagging the filing and providing early access to the complaint.
Who is suing – and why it matters
Carreyrou, best known for his book Bad Blood and the reporting that exposed the collapse of blood‑testing startup Theranos, is the marquee name in the lawsuit. He is joined by authors Lisa Barretta, Philip Shishkin, Jane Adams, Matthew Sacks and Michael Kochin, a group that spans investigative journalism, genre nonfiction and other long‑form work—all categories that AI developers have repeatedly identified as rich, high‑quality training material.
Their suit is also notable for its breadth on the other side of the caption. Rather than targeting a single company, the plaintiffs have effectively gone after most of the US AI industry at once: Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, Elon Musk’s xAI and Perplexity AI all stand accused of building frontier models on unlicensed books. For xAI, commentators have pointed out that this is the first major copyright case the still‑young company has faced, underscoring how quickly legal scrutiny has expanded beyond the earliest AI incumbents.
From “original sin” to test case
The complaint channels a broader unease that has been building for more than a year as authors, newsrooms and rights‑holders wake up to the scale of AI’s data appetites. In earlier proceedings related to the Anthropic class action, Carreyrou publicly described the use of pirated books in training as the company’s “original sin,” arguing that settlements like Anthropic’s risk normalizing copyright violations as a cost of doing business rather than a line that cannot be crossed.
By rejecting the class deal and insisting on full statutory damages, the plaintiffs are effectively asking the courts to answer a set of unresolved questions: When does scraping and ingesting creative work to train a model cross the line into infringement? If a model can reproduce the style, structure or even passages of a book in response to a prompt, should the developer be liable once or thousands of times over—and at what price? How judges respond could reverberate across publishing, journalism and AI development for years.
What’s at stake for AI and creators
For AI companies, the upside of settling has been predictability: a capped bill, a path to licensing and an opportunity to move on. Anthropic’s 1.5 billion‑dollar deal—while enormous on paper—has been described by legal commentators as a “discount” relative to the theoretical maximum penalty for millions of pirated books. If Carreyrou and his co‑plaintiffs succeed in winning higher, work‑by‑work damages against multiple AI leaders, that calculus could change overnight, raising the cost of training on unlicensed material and nudging the industry toward clearer, earlier licensing of books and news.
For authors and other creatives, the case has become a proxy for a broader fight over whether AI will become an extractive technology that quietly mines their work, or a licensed partner that pays fairly for what it uses. As Zion put it in her outreach, this is not just another lawsuit in a crowded docket; it is an early test of whether the law will keep pace with AI’s hunger for data—and whether the people who write the books that train the machines will be allowed a say in how their work is used.
Further Reading:
- https://www.claimsjournal.com/news/national/2025/12/23/334725.htm
- https://www.econotimes.com/John-Carreyrou-Sues-Major-AI-Firms-Over-Alleged-Copyrighted-Book-Use-in-AI-Training-1729371
- https://chatgptiseatingtheworld.com/2025/12/22/john-carreyrou-book-authors-file-copyright-v-entire-ai-industry-anthropic-google-meta-xai-of-elon-musk-and-perplexity-copyright-suits-hit-69/
- https://www.techloy.com/theranos-whistleblower-john-carreyrou-sues-openai-google-and-meta-in-high-stakes-ai-copyright-case/
- https://simonwillison.net/2025/Sep/6/anthropic-settlement/
- https://jasonsanford.substack.com/p/genre-grapevine-on-the-anthropic
- https://www.econlib.org/the-anthropic-settlement/
- https://www.prismedia.ai/news/john-carreyrou-sues-google-xai-openai-over-ai-training
- https://writerbeware.blog/2025/08/15/bartz-v-anthropic-find-out-if-you-may-be-part-of-this-class-action/
- https://insidetelecom.com/new-york-times-reporter-sues-google-xai-openai-over-chatbot-training/
- https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/23/john-carreyrou-and-other-authors-bring-new-lawsuit-against-six-major-ai-companies/
- http://www.econotimes.com/John-Carreyrou-Sues-Major-AI-Firms-Over-Alleged-Copyrighted-Book-Use-in-AI-Training-1729371
- http://www.digifind-it.com/Redbank/data/newspapers/register/reg-1878-1969/1968/1968-12-13.pdf
- https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-All-BC/Broadcasting-Magazine/BC-1986/BC-1986-09-29.pdf
- https://www.odwyerpr.com/pr_firms_database/2019-ODwyers-Directory-of-PR-Firms.pdf
- https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1n9gfpt/anthropic_to_pay_15_billion_to_authors_in/
- https://www.palegalads.org/journals/pdf/747_LR_Issue19_05_09_2013.pdf
- https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/new-york-times-reporter-sues-google-xai-openai-over-chatbot-training-9883772
- https://www.usmodernist.org/AIAVA/AIAVA-2013-4.pdf
- https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/artificial-intelligence/new-york-times-reporter-sues-google-xai-openai-over-chatbot-training/articleshow/126133052.cms
