A Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter whose work helped bring down Theranos is now taking on Silicon Valley’s biggest AI players — accusing them of looting his books to build billion-dollar chatbots. The complaint accuses the companies of pirating books and feeding them into large language models that power popular chatbots — without permission or compensation. 5 Carreyrou filed the lawsuit alongside five other writers against Google, Elon Musk’s xAI, OpenAI, Meta Platforms, Anthropic and Perplexity. According to the new complaint, class members in the Anthropic settlement will receive “a tiny fraction (just 2%) of the Copyright Act’s statutory ceiling of $150,000” per infringed work. The writers say that outcome illustrates why class actions fail to hold AI companies accountable.

Source: Wall Street Journal December 25, 2025 06:36 UTC