New York Times reporter sues Google, xAI, OpenAI over chatbot training

An investigative reporter best known for exposing fraud at Silicon Valley blood-testing startup Theranos sued Elon Musk's xAI, Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta Platforms and Perplexity on Monday for using copyrighted books without permission to train their artificial intelligence systems.



New York Times reporter and "Bad Blood" author John Carreyrou filed the lawsuit in California federal court with five other writers, accusing the AI companies of pirating their books and feeding them into the large language models (LLMs) that power the companies' chatbots.



The lawsuit is one of several copyright cases brought by authors and other copyright owners against tech companies over the use of their work in AI training. The case is the first to name xAI as a defendant.



Spokespeople for the defendants did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the lawsuit.



Unlike other pending cases, the writers are not seeking to band together in a larger class action - a type of lawsuit they said favors defendants by allowing them to negotiate a single settlement with many plaintiffs.