6 AI Companies Face Copyright Lawsuit From Investigative Journalist John Carreyrou

The reporter who uncovered fraud at blood-testing startup Theranos is reportedly among a group of six writers who sued six artificial intelligence (AI) companies on Monday (Dec. 22), alleging that they trained their AI systems on copyrighted works without permission.

John Carreyrou, who is now with The New York Times, and five other writers sued Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta Platforms, Perplexity and xAI, Reuters reported Monday.

A spokesperson for Perplexity said in the report that the company “doesn’t index books.”

The report noted that several copyright cases have been brought against tech companies involved with AI training. It added that the plaintiffs in this case said in their complaint that they didn’t join a larger class action because such lawsuits make it easier for defendants to settle many cases “at bargain-basement rates.”

In another recently announced case, The New York Times sued Perplexity on Dec. 5, alleging that the AI startup repeatedly violated its copyrights by retrieving The Times’ content with its AI-powered search engine and displaying large part of that content in a way that competes with The Times.

The suit also accuses Perplexity of damaging the publisher’s brand by in some cases making up information and falsely attributing that information to The Times.

Reached by PYMNTS at the time, Perplexity Head of Communication Jesse Dwyer said in an emailed statement: “Publishers have been suing new tech companies for a hundred years, starting with radio, TV, the internet, social media and now AI. Fortunately it’s never worked, or we’d all be talking about this by telegraph.”

In another case, it was reported in August that Anthropic settled a copyright infringement lawsuit brought by a group of authors who alleged that the company used pirated books without permission to train its AI assistant.

The judge in that case ruled in June that Anthropic may have illegally downloaded as many as 7 million books.

It was reported Dec. 7 that Disney sent a cease-and-desist letter to Google, alleging copyright infringement by the tech company via its AI tools. Disney called on Google to stop using its content in AI tools and to prevent those tools from generating images of Disney-owned characters.