John Carreyrou, the New York Times investigative reporter who exposed Theranos, has filed a lawsuit against xAI, Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta Platforms, and Perplexity, accusing them of using copyrighted books without permission to train their AI systems.
Carreyrou, author of Bad Blood, brought the case in California federal court along with five other writers, alleging that the companies copied their books and fed them into large language models that power popular chatbots. The filing marks the first copyright suit to name Elon Musk's xAI as a defendant.
The complaint is part of a growing wave of legal actions by authors and rights holders challenging how tech companies source training data for AI. Unlike other cases, the plaintiffs are not pursuing class-action status, arguing that large class settlements allow companies to limit liability with a single payout.
Perplexity said it does not index books, while the other companies did not immediately respond to the claims.
The lawsuit criticizes the approach taken in an earlier Anthropic case, in which the company agreed in August to pay $1.5 billion to settle claims from a class of authors. According to the new filing, authors in that settlement will receive only a small share of the maximum damages allowed under copyright law.
The case is being handled by lawyers at Freedman Normand Friedland, including Kyle Roche, who was previously profiled by Carreyrou. In earlier proceedings tied to the Anthropic settlement, a federal judge had criticized a firm Roche co-founded for encouraging authors to opt out in search of better terms.
Carreyrou has said in court that the alleged use of pirated books to build AI models was a foundational wrongdoing and that earlier settlements failed to adequately address the harm.
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June 12, 2026 17:14 ET Major central bank action was the focus this week in economic news. The European Central Bank became the first major central bank to move in response to the rising inflationary pressures in the backdrop of the conflict in the Middle East. In North America, the U.S. inflation and trade data as well as Canada’s central bank decision gained attention. The Chinese trade data was the main news in Asia.