Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter and “Bad Blood” author John Carreyrou, an investigative reporter best known for exposing fraud at Silicon Valley blood-testing startup Theranos, along with five other authors, sued xAI, Anthropic, Google OpenAI, Meta Platforms, and Perplexity late in 2025 for using their copyrighted books without permission to train their generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) systems, Reuters reports.
As Publisher’s Weekly reports,
In addition to Carreyrou … the other writers in the lawsuit are Lisa Barretta, who has written 11 books on spirituality, tattoos, and psychic development; Philip Shishkin, author of Restless Valley, a nonfiction account of Central Asian political turmoil; Jane Adams, a psychologist who has written eight nonfiction books on family relationships and life transitions; Matthew Sack, an IT professional who wrote Pro Website Development and Operations; and Michael Kochin, a political science professor at Tel Aviv University and author of Five Chapters on Rhetoric: Character, Action, Things, Nothing & Art.
The complaint is here. The case is Carreyrou v. Anthropic PBC et al, N.D. Cal., No. 25-cv-10897, complaint filed 12/22/25.
As Bloomberg Law reports,
The complaint alleges the AI companies downloaded pirated copies of plaintiffs’ books from “illegal shadow libraries” of pirated books including LibGen, Z-Library, and OceanofPDF. The companies first infringed by illegally downloading the books, and again by creating additional copies while training their models or “optimizing” their product, it says.
As Reuters notes,
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.
As of August, 2025, at least 40 such cases were pending.
Unlike some other pending cases, this new case is not a class action. For example, as we discussed in this recent blog,
Anthropic has filed a consent motion with the Ninth Circuit asking to stay its appeal of a federal district court ruling on class certification.
This is because the company has signed a binding term sheet with the plaintiffs intended to memorialize the terms of a proposed class settlement.
The plaintiffs — journalists and book authors — filed suit in 2024 alleging that Anthropic used “hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books” from unauthorized sources to train Anthropic’s Claude AI chatbot.
In a later blog, we noted that
According to the New York Times, Anthropic will pay $3,000 per work to the 500,000 authors and publishers whose works were copied without authorization.
The value of the Anthropic settlement was thus about $1.5 billion.
As we noted in the earlier blog,
Under US copyright law, damages for willful copyright infringement can be up to $150,000 per work – in this case, up to $1,050,000,000,000 – more than one trillion dollars.
The new lawsuit said class members in the Anthropic case will receive “a tiny fraction (just 2%) of the Copyright Act’s statutory ceiling of $150,000” per infringed work.
According to Reuters,
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.
He was one of the authors who opted out of the Anthropic settlement.
TechCrunch reports that some authors were dissatisfied with Anthropic settlement because “it doesn’t hold AI companies accountable for the actual act of using stolen books to train their models, which generate billions of dollars in revenue.”
Publisher’s Weekly notes that
This fall, a website under the name ClaimsHero launched with the intention of enticing authors to opt out of the Anthropic settlement and join in filing new lawsuits. As it stands, authors have until January 16 to not join the proposed settlement.
The plaintiffs in the new case allege that
LLM companies should not be able to so easily extinguish thousands upon thousands of high-value claims at bargain-basement rates, eliding what should be the true cost of their massive willful infringement.
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