Investigative reporter John Carreyrou new york times filed a lawsuit Monday against xAI, Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta, and Perplexity for allegedly using copyrighted books to train AI models without permission. Carreyrou probably because he exposed the Theranos fraudulent blood test scandal.
According to the lawsuit was filed with five other authors alleging that major technology companies are infringing on their intellectual property rights in the name of building language models at scale.
This comes after a banner year for intellectual property litigation by rights holders against AI companies. This year, nearly every type of entity that handles protected content, from movie studios to newspapers like Newspapers, filed lawsuits against AI companies. . Some of these cases have been settled in the form of partnerships, such as between Disney and OpenAI.
It is noteworthy that this lawsuit is being brought by a small number of individuals, rather than as a class action, but this is no coincidence, the authors said. “LLM companies should not be able to simply wipe out thousands of high-value claims at low rates,” the complaint says. This is also the first lawsuit of its kind to name xAI as a defendant.
A Perplexity spokesperson said: Reuters The company “does not index books.” Anthropic is no stranger to lawsuits from book publishers, with half a million authors suing for $1.5 billion. Apple was also subject to similar allegations. This latest complaint specifically refers to the Antropic Settlement, saying class participants in this case will only receive “a small portion (just 2 percent) of the copyright statute's statutory limit of $150,000.”
Engadget has reached out to xAI, Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta, and Perplexity for comment and will update if we hear back.
