Investigative journalist from the New York Times, John Carreiro, known for exposing the Theranos fraud, has filed a lawsuit against several leading tech companies in the artificial intelligence sector. This was reported by Reuters.

In the complaint, he and five other authors accuse xAI, Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta, and Perplexity of using their books to train language models without permission.

The lawsuit concerns copyright infringement and is filed individually, as the plaintiffs argue that this approach will prevent their claims from being devalued through mass settlements. The document states that AI companies should not have the ability to easily nullify thousands of high-value lawsuits for minimal amounts.

This is the first instance where xAI appears among the defendants in such a case. A representative of Perplexity commented to Reuters that the company "does not index books." Anthropic had previously been a defendant in a large class-action lawsuit from half a million authors, which concluded with a settlement of $1.5 billion.

In the complaint filed by Carreiro and other writers, it is noted that participants in that settlement will receive only about 2% of the maximum compensation provided by copyright law — $150,000 for each infringement.

The year 2025 marked a significant turning point for lawsuits against AI companies. Various rights holders, from major film studios like Disney and Warner Bros. to social platforms like Reddit, have filed lawsuits. Some of these cases ended in settlements, including a licensing agreement between Disney and OpenAI.