A group of publishers and authors has filed a class action lawsuit against Google, claiming the tech giant used their copyrighted works without permission to train its artificial intelligence platform, Gemini. The plaintiffs—which include Hachette, Cengage, Elsevier, author Scott Turow, and S.C.R.I.B.E.—further allege that Google deliberately removed or altered copyright information from these works to “conceal… that its Gemini Models were trained on stolen materials,” according to the legal filing.

This case is just one of many complaints that publishers, authors, and other copyright holders have lodged against AI companies like Google, Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic. While most of these lawsuits remain unresolved, two early court decisions in California have favored the AI firms, ruling that using copyrighted material for AI training qualifies as “fair use” under U.S. copyright law—a law that hasn’t been updated since before the internet existed. However, Anthropic was fined $1.5 billion for pirating the works it trained on, marking the largest payout in U.S. copyright history. Approximately half a million writers became eligible for payments of at least $3,000, though many opted out of the settlement to pursue further legal action over AI training.

The California judges’ rulings don’t bode well for how other courts might view the tech companies’ fair use defense, but the issue is too nuanced for these decisions to set an ironclad precedent. The lawsuit against Google was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, giving a different judge the chance to weigh in. In this case, the publishers have a more complex, long-standing relationship with Google. The lawsuit explains that publishers and authors have historically provided Google with copyrighted works for the specific purpose of making books searchable through Google Books. These search results don’t allow users to view entire books; instead, they offer short snippets along with bibliographic information.

The plaintiffs claim that Google trained Gemini on copies of these books, as well as books uploaded to the Google Play store, even though it never received permission to do so. “Google illegally copied works from all these scope-limited programs for AI training, knowing it lacked authorization to do so,” the lawsuit states. The plaintiffs also cite an internal Google document that allegedly acknowledges that using copyrighted books for AI training could be “highly problematic for Google” and might result in “$10Bs-$100Bs in potential fines.” Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.