A group of authors, including Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist John Carreyrou, has filed a copyright lawsuit against six leading artificial intelligence companies in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

The lawsuit accuses Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, Meta, xAI, and Perplexity of “deliberate theft,” alleging that the authors’ books have been incorporated into AI systems without compensation. The plaintiffs claim their works have become central to a multibillion-dollar AI product ecosystem.

The authors are seeking damages, with penalties of up to $150,000 per infringed work if the court finds willful copyright violation.