Chicken Soup for the Soul publisher sues tech companies over AI training

By Blake Brittain

March 18 (Reuters) - Book publisher Chicken Soup for the Soul sued several Big Tech companies in California federal court late Tuesday for allegedly misusing its content to train their artificial intelligence systems.

The publisher said that Apple AAPL.O, Google GOOGL.O, Nvidia NVDA.O, Meta Platforms META.O, OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity AI and Elon Musk's xAI used pirated copies of its books to teach their chatbots to respond to human prompts.

The publisher's complaint is unique in targeting several tech juggernauts at once. The lawsuit was filed by attorneys at law firm Freedman Normand Friedland, who have brought a similar ongoing case against Big Tech companies on behalf of writer John Carreyrou and other authors.

"The action holds major AI companies accountable for exploiting hundreds of copyrighted works, sourced from illicit databases, without permission," Freedman Normand Friedland partner Kyle Roche said in a statement. "The message is clear: companies cannot build billion-dollar technologies on stolen creative expression."

Spokespeople for the tech companies did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the complaint on Wednesday.

Chicken Soup for the Soul publishes a series of inspirational books by the same name that have sold more than 500 million copies worldwide. Its lawsuit said that the companies downloaded bootleg copies of its books from "shadow libraries" to use in AI training.

The publisher's lawsuit is one of dozens of high-stakes cases brought by authors, news outlets and other copyright owners against tech companies for using their work to train the large language models behind their chatbots.

Chicken Soup for the Soul's lawsuit said that its first-person narratives in "natural, conversational language that conveys emotion, moral reflection, and coherent storytelling in concise form" are uniquely suited to train AI to "replicate authentic human voice, narrative pacing, emotional tone, and story structure."

"Instead of paying for that value or licensing access to these works, Defendants pilfered illegal copies and used those copies to build systems now worth many hundreds of billions of dollars," the complaint said.

The case is Chicken Soup for the Soul LLC v. Anthropic PBC, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, No. 5:26-cv-02333.

For the publisher: Kyle Roche, Velvel Freedman and Alex Potter of Freedman Normand Friedland; Elizabeth Brannen, John Stokes, Bridget Asay, Christopher Rigali and Lauren Martin of Stris & Maher

For the tech companies: attorney information not yet available