AI

Adobe has been sued in a proposed class action suit over using books to train its AI software. The lead plaintiff in the case is Art Kleiner, author of the 1996 book The Age of Heretics: Heroes, Outlaws, and the Forerunners of Corporate Change, which was included in the Books3 dataset. Books3 is part of the SlimPajama dataset, which Adobe used to train its “SlimLM small language models,” which provides “document assistance tasks on mobile devices,” according to the complaint. “This runs contrary to Adobe’s outspoken stance on ethical AI development and use” for its AI image generator, Firefly, the […]

In a new filing, Google opposes Hachette and Cengage’s motion to join a class action of writers against the tech giant. Google argues that the publishers’ intervention is “untimely” since they could have joined the “widely reported suit” any time after it began in July 2023, including when Google subpoenaed Hachette in March 2025. Allowing the publishers to intervene in the case “would massively disrupt the proceedings and prejudice Google,” the company says. “If book publishers Cengage and Hachette…want to present ‘their own evidence and arguments’ about how Google supposedly infringed their copyrights, …they can file their own case,” the […]

A set of unredacted and less-redacted documents from the Anthropic case have been released, revealing more details on the tech company’s secret plan to copy every book in existence to teach their AI tool “how to write well.” “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world,” Anthropic said in the filings, as reported by the Washington Post. “We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.” In Project Panama, Anthropic estimated that there are approximately 130 million unique books in the world, including 40 million that are able to be […]

Hachette Book Group and Cengage have moved to intervene in a class action lawsuit first brought by writers and illustrators against Google in 2023, accusing the company of copyright infringement in using their books to train its AI system Gemini. They will represent the interests of publishers, a class of rightsholders who are not currently represented in the suit. The Association of American Publishers writes, “The publishers have moved to intervene now given recent efforts by the individual plaintiffs to certify a class that includes publishers as copyright owners of many works in suit, and Google’s objection to that effort […]