John Carreyrou, the investigative journalist who exposed the Theranos fraud, filed a lawsuit against xAI, Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta, and Perplexity for allegedly using copyrighted books to train their LLMs without permission. The complaint marks the first copyright case to name Elon Musk’s xAI as a defendant and notably eschews a class-action strategy, arguing that such settlements allow tech giants to extinguish claims at “bargain-basement rates.” Carreyrou’s legal team, led by Kyle Roche, contended that the recent $1.5 billion Anthropic settlement provided authors with only a tiny fraction of the potential $150,000 statutory damages per infringed work.
