Oct 16 (Reuters) - Cloud-computing firm Salesforce ( CRM )

was hit with a proposed class action lawsuit by two

authors who alleged the company used thousands of books without

permission to train its artificial intelligence software.

Novelists Molly Tanzer and Jennifer Gilmore said in the

complaint filed on Wednesday that Salesforce ( CRM ) infringed

copyrights by using their work to train its xGen AI models to

process language.

A Salesforce ( CRM ) spokesperson declined to comment on the lawsuit

on Thursday.

"It's important that companies that use copyrighted material

for ... AI products are transparent," attorney Joseph Saveri,

who represents the authors and has brought similar lawsuits on

behalf of copyright owners against tech companies, said on

Thursday. "It's also only fair that our clients are fairly

compensated when this happens."

Authors, news outlets and other content owners have filed dozens

of lawsuits against tech companies including OpenAI, Microsoft

and Meta Platforms for allegedly misusing their material in AI

training. Anthropic agreed to a landmark $1.5 billion settlement

with a separate group of authors suing it for copyright

infringement in August.

Tanzer and Gilmore said in their lawsuit that Salesforce ( CRM )

used thousands of pirated books written by them and others to

train xGen. The lawsuit said that Salesforce ( CRM ) CEO Marc Benioff

has previously criticized AI companies for using "stolen"

training data to build their models and said that paying content

creators for their work would be "very easy to do."

"Benioff is right - technology companies like Benioff's own

Salesforce ( CRM ) that use the intellectual property of copyright

holders like Plaintiffs and Class members should fairly

compensate them," the complaint said.