GOOGL, META, xAI, OpenAI: NYT Reporter Sues AI Giants Over Chatbot Training

AI giants are facing yet another lawsuit. This time, New York Times reporter and “Bad Blood” author John Carreyrou, joined by five other writers, has filed a federal suit in California against Google (GOOGL), Meta (META), xAI (PC:XAI), and OpenAI (PC:OPAIQ). The lawsuit claims these companies used these authors’ books without permission to train the large language models behind popular AI chatbots.

For context, AI chatbots from Google, OpenAI, and others are trained on massive amounts of text data and books are part of it. The AI reads the text to learn language patterns, grammar, facts, and context so it can generate human-like responses.

AI Giants in Legal Trouble

The lawsuit is one of several copyright cases filed by authors and other rights holders against tech companies for using their work to train AI. However, this is the first case to name xAI as a defendant.

Unlike other pending cases, the writers are not joining a class-action lawsuit, which they say often favors defendants by letting them settle with many plaintiffs at once. For instance, Anthropic (PC:ANTPQ) settled a major AI copyright case in September, agreeing to pay $1.5 billion to authors who claimed it used millions of books without permission. However, the new lawsuit notes that class members in that case would only receive a tiny portion—about 2% of the Copyright Act’s $150,000 limit per work.

In other words, even though the total settlement was huge, each author got only a tiny fraction of the potential maximum compensation.

The writers argue that LLM companies should not be able to wipe out thousands of high-value claims at “bargain-basement rates.”

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