Anthropic, Nvidia Sway Judge to Split Authors’ AI Copyright Suit

A group of big tech companies convinced a federal judge to split up authors’ copyright lawsuit accusing them of pirating books to build artificial intelligence models.

The authors’ allegation that Anthropic PBC, Google LLC, Apple Inc., Nvidia Corp., Perplexity AI Inc., and xAI Corp. used the same library of pirated books to infringe isn’t sufficient to lump all of the companies into one lawsuit, Judge P. Casey Pitts of the US District Court for the Northern District of California ruled Monday. The lawsuit will proceed against Anthropic, and claims against the other companies are severed into five separate actions.

• There are no allegations of conspiracy that could justify joinder for the “business rivals seeking to corner the LLM market,” Pitts added
• The works at issue include Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist John Carreyrou’s book about Elizabeth Holmes’ infamous health technology company Theranos
• Meta Platforms Inc. and OpenAI Inc. were initially named defendants, but the claims against Meta were related to an existing case in the same district court, and those against OpenAI were severed and added to multidistrict litigation against the AI giant in New York

Google is represented by Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. Sullivan & Cromwell LLP represents xAI. Perplexity is represented by Mayer Brown LLP. Latham & Watkins LLP represents Apple. Nvidia is represented by Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP. White & Case LLP represents Anthropic.

The authors are represented by Freedman Normand Friedland LLP and Stris & Maher LLP.

The case is Carreyrou v. Anthropic PBC, N.D. Cal., No. 25-cv-10897, order filed 6/8/26.