On December 22 (local time), six authors, among whom is two-time Pulitzer Prize laureate John Carreyrou, initiated a copyright infringement lawsuit in a federal court in California, USA. The defendants include xAI, Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta, and Perplexity. The plaintiffs alleged that these companies trained their large language models using copyrighted books without obtaining prior consent, an act they characterized as "blatant theft." They emphasized that their literary works have underpinned a multi-billion-dollar AI industry, yet they have not received any form of compensation. Should the court determine the infringement to be intentional, each copyrighted work could potentially qualify for statutory damages of up to $150,000.
