A group of authors, including John Carreyrou, the journalist behind the bestselling exposé “Bad Blood” and the whistleblower who exposed Theranos, has filed a new lawsuit against six major AI companies: Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta, xAI, and Perplexity. The lawsuit alleges that these companies trained their large language models on pirated copies of copyrighted books without permission, violating authors’ intellectual property rights. This legal action follows a previous class-action suit brought by a different group of authors against Anthropic, which resulted in a $1.5 billion settlement. In that case, a judge ruled that while it is legal for AI companies to use pirated books for training models under certain interpretations of fair use, the act of pirating the books in the first place remains illegal. Under the settlement, eligible authors received approximately $3,000 each, but many feel the compensation is insufficient and fails to address the core issue: the widespread, profit-driven use of stolen content to build billion-dollar AI systems. The new lawsuit argues that the earlier settlement effectively lets AI companies avoid meaningful accountability. “The proposed Anthropic settlement seems to serve [the AI companies], not creators,” the complaint states. It contends that the companies are profiting massively from AI models trained on unauthorized content, while authors receive minimal compensation and no acknowledgment of wrongdoing. The plaintiffs emphasize that the use of pirated material to train AI systems constitutes a “massive willful infringement” and that the cost of such violations should not be settled for a fraction of the value generated by the resulting AI products. They argue that allowing these companies to resolve thousands of claims for low payouts sets a dangerous precedent that undermines copyright protections in the digital age. The lawsuit seeks broader remedies, including damages, injunctive relief, and a formal acknowledgment that the unauthorized use of copyrighted books for AI training is not a permissible practice under current law. It also calls for greater transparency and compensation mechanisms for creators whose works are used without consent. As AI continues to reshape publishing, media, and content creation, this case could have far-reaching implications for how intellectual property is treated in the era of machine learning.