Google, xAI, OpenAI sued over chatbot training – The Hindu
December 23, 2025e-Paper
The View From India Looking at World Affairs from the Indian perspective.
First Day First Show News and reviews from the world of cinema and streaming.
Today's Cache Your download of the top 5 technology stories of the day.
Science For All The weekly newsletter from science writers takes the jargon out of science and puts the fun in!
Data Point Decoding the headlines with facts, figures, and numbers
Health Matters Ramya Kannan writes to you on getting to good health, and staying there
The Hindu On Books Books of the week, reviews, excerpts, new titles and features.
December 23, 2025e-Paper
Published – December 23, 2025 09:35 am IST
A laptop screen shows an interaction with an AI chatbot. Image for representation | Photo Credit: Reuters
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.
“LLM companies should not be able to so easily extinguish thousands upon thousands of high-value claims at bargain-basement rates,” the complaint said. Anthropic reached the first major settlement in an AI-training copyright dispute in August, agreeing to pay $1.5 billion to a class of authors who said the company pirated millions of books. The new lawsuit said class members in that case will receive “a tiny fraction (just 2%) of the Copyright Act’s statutory ceiling of $150,000” per infringed work.
Monday’s complaint was filed by attorneys at law firm Freedman Normand Friedland including Kyle Roche, whom Mr. Carreyrou profiled in a 2023 New York Times article.
During a November hearing in the Anthropic class action, U.S. District Judge William Alsup criticized a separate law firm Roche co-founded for gathering authors to opt out of the settlement in search of “a sweeter deal.” Roche declined to comment on Monday.
Mr. Carreyrou told the judge at a later hearing that stealing books to build its AI was Anthropic’s “original sin” and that the settlement did not go far enough.
Published – December 23, 2025 09:35 am IST
Artificial Intelligence
Copyright© 2025, THG PUBLISHING PVT LTD. or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.
BACK TO TOP
Terms & conditions | Institutional Subscriber
Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments.
We have migrated to a new commenting platform. If you are already a registered user of The Hindu and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle.
