Dec 22 (Reuters) - An investigative reporter best known

for exposing fraud at Silicon Valley blood-testing startup

Theranos sued Elon Musk's xAI, Anthropic, Google,

OpenAI, Meta Platforms ( META ) and Perplexity on Monday for

using copyrighted books without permission ‌to train their

artificial intelligence systems.

New York Times reporter and "Bad Blood" author John

Carreyrou filed the lawsuit in California ​federal court with

five other writers, accusing the AI companies of pirating their

books ‍and feeding them into the large language models (LLMs)

that power ⁠the companies' chatbots.

The lawsuit ⁠is one of several copyright cases brought by authors

and other copyright owners against tech companies over ‌the use

of their work in AI training. ​The case is the first to name xAI

as a defendant.

A spokesperson for Perplexity said that the company "doesn't

index books." Spokespeople for ⁠the other defendants did not

immediately respond ‍to requests ​for comment on the lawsuit.

Unlike other pending cases, the writers are not seeking to

band together in a larger class action - a type of ‍lawsuit they

said favors defendants by allowing them to negotiate a single

settlement with many plaintiffs.

"LLM companies should not be able to so easily extinguish

thousands upon thousands of high-value claims at

bargain-basement rates," the complaint said.

Anthropic reached the first major settlement in an AI-training

copyright dispute in August, agreeing to pay $1.5 billion to a

class ​of ‍authors who said the company pirated millions of books.

The new lawsuit said class members in that case will receive "a

tiny fraction (just 2%) of ​the Copyright Act's statutory ceiling

of $150,000" per infringed work.

Monday's complaint was filed by attorneys at law firm

Freedman Normand Friedland including Kyle Roche, whom Carreyrou

profiled in a 2023 New York Times article.

During a November hearing in the Anthropic class action,

U.S. District Judge William Alsup criticized a separate law firm

Roche co-founded for gathering authors to opt out of the

settlement ​in search of "a sweeter deal." Roche declined to

comment on Monday.

Carreyrou told the judge at a later hearing that stealing

books to build its AI was Anthropic's "original sin" and that

the settlement did not go ‍far enough.