News Summary

John Carreyrou, an investigative reporter for the New York Times known for exposing the Theranos scandal, has filed a lawsuit against several AI companies, including xAI, Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta, and Perplexity. The lawsuit, filed in California federal court, accuses these companies of using copyrighted books without permission to train their AI models. Carreyrou, along with five other writers, claims that these AI companies have violated their intellectual property rights by pirating their books for building large language models (LLMs). This lawsuit is part of a series of copyright cases brought by authors and rights holders against tech companies over the unauthorized use of their work in AI training. In a related case, Anthropic previously settled a class-action lawsuit for $1.5 billion with a group of authors. The complaint highlights that the companies have been exploiting copyrighted material without providing fair compensation, and it marks the first instance where xAI is named as a defendant.