John Carreyrou and 5 other book authors (Lisa Barretta, Philip Shishkin, Jane Adams, Matthew Sacks, and Michael Kochin) ho opted out of the Bartz v. Anthropic with the encouragement of ClaimsHero, an Arizona-based law firm that has specialized in claims aggregation, have filed today a copyright lawsuit against nearly the entire U.S. AI industry:
- Anthropic
- OpenAI
- Meta
- xAI — Elon Musk’s company
- Perplexity AI.
The AI-industry wide lawsuit was filed in the Northern District of California. (Not sued in this suit but sued in other book author suits: Microsoft, NVIDIA, Apple, Salesforce, Bloomberg.)
Lawyers from Friedman Normand Friedland LLP who represented ClaimsHero in the evidentiary hearing before Judge Alsup in Bartz are joined by lawyers from Stris & Maher LLP in representing the plaintiff book authors.
This is the first copyright lawsuit against Elon Musk’s xAI. (Musk and Tesla face a different suit filed by Alcon Entertainment for their alleged use of substantially similar still from Bladerunner 2049.) This is copyright lawsuit No. 70 related to AI companies if we include the recently filed Google v. SerpApi.
The Plaintiffs say they are not filing a class action:
“Plaintiffs elect not to bring this case as a class action because the Copyright Act entitles them to recover individualized statutory damages, determined by a jury, for each Defendant’s infringement of their work. Plaintiffs desire to retain full control of their case and avoid having their rights diluted by being swept into sprawling class-action settlements structured to resolve claims for pennies on the dollar.” (Paragraph 13.)
The Complaint alleges only one count of direct infringement, which includes the Shadow Library Strategy:
Excerpt from Complaint:
DOWNLOAD THE COMPLAINT IN CARREYROU V. ANTHROPIC
For more about the controversy ClaimsHero provoked in Bartz v. Anthropic, visit:
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