Authors including John Carreyrou sue six AI companies over pirated training books
Filing individually rather than joining a class action, the authors argued settlements like Anthropic's paid roughly $3,000 per book, far less than statutory damages could yield.
- Courts & copyright
- Minor
A group of authors led by John Carreyrou, the journalist and author of Bad Blood, filed individual copyright lawsuits against Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, xAI and Perplexity, alleging the companies trained their models on pirated copies of the authors’ books without permission or payment. Rather than joining an existing class action, the plaintiffs filed separately, arguing that class settlements extinguish large numbers of high-value claims too cheaply — TechCrunch reported them saying that “LLM companies should not be able to so easily extinguish thousands upon thousands of high-value claims at bargain-basement rates.”
The suits followed Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement of a separate class action over book piracy, which paid eligible authors roughly $3,000 per work — a sum many writers had called inadequate against the revenue generated by the models trained on their work, and one the Carreyrou group’s individual-suit strategy appeared designed to avoid.
The filing was one of several book- and publisher-related copyright actions reaching AI companies in December 2025 alone, including suits by the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times against Perplexity, underscoring that the Anthropic settlement had resolved one piece of AI copyright litigation without closing off the broader dispute over how creators are compensated for training data.