Investigative reporter John Carreyrou new York Times filed a lawsuit on Monday against XAI, Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta, and Perplexity for training their AI models on copyrighted books without permission. Carreyrou is probably meant to expose the Theranos fraudulent blood testing scandal.
according to The lawsuit was filed with five other authors, who claim that big tech companies are infringing on their intellectual property rights in the name of building large language models.
This comes after a banner year for IP lawsuits against AI companies by rights holders. Nearly every type of entity doing business in protected content has gone to court against AI companies this year, from movie studios to newspapers like the Internet. In some of these cases the agreement has been reached in the form of a partnership, such as between Disney and OpenAI,
It’s notable that this case is being brought by a small group of individuals rather than a class action, which the authors involved say is no accident. “LLM companies should not be able to so easily liquidate thousands of high-value claims at a bargain price,” the complaint states. It is also the first case of its kind to list XAI as a defendant.
Perplexity spokesperson said reuters That the company “does not index books.” Anthropic, for its part, is no stranger to lawsuits from book publishers, having been sued by half a million authors for $1.5 billion. Apple was also surrounded by similar allegations. This latest complaint specifically mentions the Anthropic settlement, stating that class members in that case will only receive “a small fraction (only 2 percent) of the Copyright Act’s $150,000 statutory limit.”
Engadget has contacted xAI, Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta and Perplexity for comment and will update with any responses.
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