New York Times reporter sues Elon Musk's xAI, Google, OpenAI over copyright infringement

In a latest development surrounding the long-standing clash between AI firms and their non-consensual use of authors' works, a New York Times reporter, John Carreyrou, has sued Elon Musk's xAI, Google, OpenAI, and other tech companies for allegedly using copyrighted books without permission to train their artificial intelligence systems.

Carreyrou is known for his investigation into the Theranos scandal.

His lawsuit is filed in California federal court and includes five other writers who accuse these companies of pirating their works to enhance the large language models (LLMs) powering their chatbots.

The case is substantial as it is the first to name xAI as a defendant and comprises part of a long-running trend of copyright lawsuits from authors against tech firms using their content in AI training, Reuters reported.

The plaintiffs are not pursuing a class action, which they believe would favour defendants by allowing them to negotiate a single settlement with multiple claimants.

The complaint underlines that LLM companies should not be able to dismiss numerous high-value claims at minimal costs.

In a similar copyright dispute in August, Anthropic reached a significant settlement and agreed to pay $1.5 billion to authors who claimed their books were pirated.

The distinct property of the lawsuit in question is that it argues that class members from that case will receive only a small fraction of potential damages.

The complaint was filed by attorneys from Freedman Normand Friedland, including Kyle Roche, who was highlighted in a 2023 New York Times article by Carreyrou.