On December 22, John Carreyrou, a two-time Pulitzer Prize laureate and the author of Bad Blood, along with five fellow writers, initiated a class-action lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The defendants in this case are six major AI entities: OpenAI, Google, Meta, Anthropic, xAI, and Perplexity AI.

The lawsuit claims that these companies engaged in the mass downloading of millions of copyrighted books from pirated book platforms like LibGen and Z-Library. This was done with the intention of training their large language models and refining their products, thereby creating an unlawful closed cycle of "pirated acquisition - model training - commercial monetization." The plaintiffs stress that their intellectual creations serve as the foundation for a multi-billion-dollar AI ecosystem, yet they have not received any form of compensation.

In the event that the jury concludes that the infringement was carried out willfully, each work that has been infringed upon could be eligible for damages of up to $150,000. This legal action is notable as it is the first instance where xAI has been listed as a defendant. Moreover, the plaintiffs have made it clear that they will not accept a class-action settlement. Their stance is aimed at preventing the defendants from putting an end to large-scale claims by offering a one-time, low-value settlement.

It's worth mentioning that Anthropic previously settled similar disputes for $1.5 billion. However, the plaintiffs pointed out that in that particular case, authors only received 2% of the maximum statutory compensation.