A collective of authors, featuring Theranos whistleblower and "Bad Blood" writer John Carreyrou, is initiating legal action against Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta, xAI, and Perplexity. The suit alleges these firms trained their artificial intelligence models using unlawfully copied versions of the authors' books.

This situation echoes a previous class action lawsuit filed by a different group of writers against Anthropic for identical copyright violations. In that earlier case, the court determined that while it is permissible for Anthropic and comparable AI companies to utilize such material for training, the initial act of pirating the books remains illegal.

Although qualifying authors stand to receive approximately $3,000 each from Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement fund, many have expressed dissatisfaction with this outcome. Their concern is that the arrangement fails to make AI companies answerable for the core issue: profiting from stolen literary works to train models that generate billions in revenue.

The plaintiffs in the new lawsuit argue that the proposed settlement with Anthropic "seems to serve [the AI companies], not creators." Their filing further states, "LLM companies should not be able to so easily extinguish thousands upon thousands of high-value claims at bargain-basement rates, eliding what should be the true cost of their massive willful infringement."