NEW YORK TIMES JOURNALIST SUES AI COMPANIES. (PHOTO).

New York Times journalist sues AI companies

Investigative journalist John Carreyrou of the New York Times has filed a lawsuit against xAI, Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta, and Perplexity, alleging that the companies trained their AI models using copyrighted books without authorization. Carreyrou, who gained recognition for uncovering the Theranos blood-testing scandal, filed the suit Monday alongside five other authors claiming tech companies have infringed on their intellectual property while developing large language models.

The case comes amid a surge of intellectual property lawsuits against AI companies this year, involving rights holders from movie studios such as Disney and Warner Bros. to news organizations including the New York Times and Chicago Tribune. Some disputes have resulted in settlements, like the licensing deal between Disney and OpenAI. Unlike many prior class-action suits, this complaint is being brought by a small group of authors, who argue that class actions can allow AI companies to settle high-value claims cheaply. The lawsuit is also the first to name xAI as a defendant. Perplexity responded that it does not index books, while Anthropic recently settled a class-action lawsuit with half a million authors for $1.5 billion. The complaint notes that participants in that case received only a small portion of the potential statutory damages. The other defendants have not commented.