OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI Hit With Copyright Suit from Writers (1)

Writers including Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist John Carreyrou filed a copyright lawsuit accusing six AI giants of using pirated copies of their books to train large language models.

The complaint, filed Monday in the US District Court for the Northern District of California, claims Anthropic PBC, Google LLC, OpenAI Inc., Meta Platforms Inc., xAI Corp., and Perplexity AI Inc. committed a “deliberate act of theft.”

It is the first copyright lawsuit against xAI over its training process, and the first suit brought by authors against Perplexity.

“Legacy Media Lies,” xAI said in an email. The other companies didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Carreyrou is among the authors who opted out of a $1.5 billion class-action settlement with Anthropic.

One of the law firms representing the authors, Freedman Normand Friedland LLP, appeared in court last month to defend a law firm accused of attempting to “trick” authors out of the Anthropic settlement. The judge overseeing the settlement warned the firm against promising authors to separately sue Anthropic and then backing out, saying ”that would be so unethical you should be disbarred.”

All of the plaintiffs in Monday’s complaint appeared at the November hearing to assure the court they weren’t duped into opting out.

The complaint alleges the AI companies downloaded pirated copies of plaintiffs’ books from “illegal shadow libraries” of pirated books including LibGen, Z-Library, and OceanofPDF. The companies first infringed by illegally downloading the books, and again by creating additional copies while training their models or “optimizing” their product, it says.

The writers say their books “now anchor multibillion-dollar product ecosystems” without compensation.

The authors didn’t bring the suit as a class action because they don’t want resolve their claims “for pennies on the dollar,” the complaint said, citing the Anthropic deal, under which each work is entitled to about $3,000. A jury could award the authors up to $150,000 in damages per infringed work, if it finds infringement was willful.

“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 complaint said.

Stris & Maher LLP also represents the authors.

The case is Carreyrou v. Anthropic PBC et al, N.D. Cal., No. 25-cv-10897, complaint filed 12/22/25.