Microsoft sued by authors over use of books in AI training

By Blake Brittain

Microsoft has been hit with a lawsuit by a group of authors who claim the company used their books without permission to train its Megatron artificial intelligence model.

Kai Bird, Jia Tolentino, Daniel Okrent and several others alleged that Microsoft used pirated digital versions of their books to teach its AI to respond to human prompts. Their lawsuit filed in New York federal court on Tuesday, is one of several high-stakes cases brought by authors, news outlets and other copyright holders against tech companies including Meta Platforms, Anthropic and Microsoft-backed OpenAI over alleged misuse of their material in AI training.

The complaint against Microsoft came a day after a California federal judge ruled that Anthropic made fair use under U.S. copyright law of authors’ material to train its AI systems but may still be liable for pirating their books. It was the first U.S. decision on the legality of using copyrighted