Copyright Infringement Case Filed Against Google, OpenAI and xAI

Several major artificial intelligence companies, including Google, OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, Perplexity, and Elon Musk’s xAI, are facing a fresh copyright infringement lawsuit filed by a group of authors. The case was submitted to the US District Court in Northern California by six writers, including New York Times investigative journalist John Carreyrou.

The authors have filed individual lawsuits instead of a class action, citing past experiences where large settlements resulted in minimal compensation per author. They allege that these companies illegally used their copyrighted books to train large language models without permission.

Notably, this is the first copyright lawsuit to name xAI as a defendant. While Perplexity has denied the claims, the lawsuit accuses the companies of downloading pirated copies of books from shadow-library websites such as LibGen, Z-Library, and OceanofPDF to train and optimize their AI models. The plaintiffs are demanding a jury trial, statutory damages, and full disclosure of the copyrighted materials used in training these AI systems.