12/25 – A group of authors has filed individual copyright infringement lawsuits in the Northern District of California against several major AI companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, xAI, and Perplexity AI, alleging unauthorized copying of their books to train large language models. The plaintiffs—including investigative journalist John Carreyrou—assert that the companies sourced copyrighted works from pirate libraries such as Library Genesis and Z-Library without permission or compensation.

The lawsuits follow the authors’ decision to opt out of a proposed global settlement with Anthropic that would have limited recovery to approximately $3,000 per title. Instead, the plaintiffs seek statutory damages under the Copyright Act, including enhanced damages for willful infringement, and demand individual jury trials.
In emphasizing individual actions rather than a collective class action, the filings reflect the plaintiffs’ effort to hold each defendant directly accountable for alleged piracy-based data sourcing and to pursue maximum statutory damages per work under the Copyright Act, setting up a potential test case on the intersection of AI training practices and authors’ rights.