John Carreyrou and other writers have brought new lawsuits against six major AI companies

A group of authors, including Theranos whistleblower and author of “Bad Blood” John Carreyrou, criticizes Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta, xAI, and Perplexity, accusing the companies of training their models on their suppressed books.

If this sounds familiar, it’s because other authors have already filed a lawsuit against Anthropic for the same copyright infringement. In that case, a the judge ruled that it was acceptable for Anthropic and similar AI companies to teach on pirated books, but that it was not acceptable to hide these books in the first place.

While eligible writers could receive about $3,000 from the $1.5 billion Anthropic settlement, other writers were. not satisfied and that decision – it doesn’t hold AI companies accountable for real-life cases of using plagiarism to train their models, which creates billions of dollars in money.

According to the new lawsuit, the plaintiffs say Anthropic’s setup “seems to serve (AI companies), not developers.”

“LLM’s companies should not be able to easily turn off thousands of valuable products at inflated prices, removing the true cost of their willful violations,” the lawsuit states.