A group of six authors, including Pulitzer Prize winner John Carreyrou, has filed new lawsuits against six major AI companies, saying their books were used without permission to train AI models. The lawsuits were filed on December 22, 2025, in California.
The companies named are Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, xAI, and Perplexity AI. The authors claim these companies copied their books from pirate sites like LibGen and Z‑Library to teach AI systems, then profited from the AI models without paying the writers.
Carreyrou, known for Bad Blood, and the other authors rejected a $1.5 billion class action settlement offered by Anthropic earlier this year, saying the payment of around $3,000 per book is far too low for the value of their work.
Instead of joining a class action, the authors are filing individual lawsuits, which allows them to seek the maximum $150,000 per book per company. Across the six companies, this could reach up to $900,000 per book.
The group includes writers from different fields, spiritual books, psychology, IT, and political science, showing concern from many types of authors about how AI uses their work.
The lawsuits focus on AI using pirated books, which the authors say is not fair use and should have stronger legal consequences. Some courts have allowed limited AI use of copyrighted works, but using pirated copies is more serious.
So far, the companies have not responded, and no court dates have been set.
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