Overview
- John Carreyrou and five other writers filed a federal complaint naming Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, xAI and Perplexity as defendants.
- The authors allege the companies copied their books from shadow libraries including LibGen, Z‑Library and OceanofPDF to build or optimize large language models.
- The suit forgoes a class action and seeks statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work from each defendant, with individual jury trials for each author.
- The filing criticizes Anthropic’s $1.5 billion class settlement, saying expected payouts equal about 2% of the Copyright Act’s maximum.
- The case is pending in California federal court; Perplexity says it “doesn’t index books,” and other companies did not immediately comment.