Overview
- The lawsuit was filed in the Northern District of California by six authors led by New York Times reporter John Carreyrou.
- Defendants are OpenAI, Google, Meta, Anthropic, Perplexity and Elon Musk’s xAI, which appears in an author lawsuit for the first time.
- The complaint alleges the companies pulled pirated copies from shadow libraries LibGen, Z-Library and OceanofPDF to train or optimize large language models.
- The authors opted out of class actions, seek individual jury trials, and demand statutory damages of $150,000 per work against each defendant.
- The filing criticizes Anthropic’s $1.5 billion class settlement as paying roughly 2% of the statutory maximum per work; defendants have not offered detailed responses, and Perplexity says it doesn’t index books.