On December 22 (local time), John Carreyrou, a journalist from The New York Times—best known for uncovering the fraud scandal at Silicon Valley's blood-testing firm Theranos—along with five fellow writers, initiated a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The defendants named in the suit are six AI companies: xAI, Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta, and Perplexity. The legal complaint asserts that these companies trained their large language models using copyright-protected books without obtaining proper authorization, which amounts to "intentional infringement."

The plaintiffs highlighted that the companies sourced books in large quantities from websites hosting illegal, pirated content, using these materials for model training and product refinement. This practice, they argue, forms an unlawful cycle of "pirated acquisition → model training → commercial monetization." The writers stressed that their creative works serve as the foundation for a multi-billion-dollar AI industry, yet they have not received any financial compensation.

If the jury rules that the infringement was deliberate, each work infringed upon could result in statutory damages of up to $150,000.