A coalition of writers, led by Theranos whistleblower and author John Carreyrou, has filed a lawsuit against six major artificial‑intelligence companies—Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta, xAI and Perplexity. The suit alleges the firms trained large language models on pirated copies of the authors’ books, violating copyright. The complaint references an earlier class‑action case in which a judge ruled that while using pirated material to train models may be lawful, the act of pirating the books itself is illegal. Authors claim the recent $1.5 billion Anthropic settlement, which offers modest payouts to eligible writers, favors the AI companies and fails to hold them accountable. Read more →

OpenAI faces pressure to reveal why it removed two internal datasets built from a shadow library of pirated books. The move comes amid a class‑action lawsuit from authors who allege the company trained ChatGPT on their works without permission. While OpenAI initially said the datasets were deleted because they fell out of use, it later claimed that any reason for deletion is protected by attorney‑client privilege. A U.S. district judge has ordered the company to produce internal communications about the deletion, including references to the library source. Read more →