Microsoft Faces Lawsuit Over Alleged AI Training With Authors’ Books

Big Tech is back in the courtroom this time, it's Microsoft under fire. A group of prominent authors has filed a lawsuit accusing the company of stealing their work to train its artificial intelligence model, Megatron.

The lawsuit, filed in New York federal court, alleges Microsoft used nearly 200,000 pirated books to teach its AI to mimic human language. Among the plaintiffs are Kai Bird, Jia Tolentino, and Daniel Okrent, who claim their copyrighted works were repurposed without consent to build a product that now competes with them in the digital marketplace.

This is just the latest in a wave of lawsuits slamming tech companies like Meta, OpenAI, and Anthropic for using copyrighted material without compensation. It also comes on the heels of a California ruling that could shape the future of AI litigation a judge found that Anthropic’s use of such material may constitute “fair use,” but could still carry liability for distributing pirated content.

• Authors are seeking up to $150,000 per work for alleged infringement.

• Microsoft has yet to respond publicly to the lawsuit.

• Plaintiffs say the Megatron model mimics the syntax, voice, and themes of their original work.

At the heart of the issue is this: Should tech be allowed to profit from content created by others without paying a cent? Microsoft, like many of its Silicon Valley peers, argues that training AI on vast amounts of data is “transformative” and therefore protected under “fair use.” But there’s nothing transformative about building a business on stolen property.

Imagine a company photocopying thousands of best-selling books and using them to build a product that competes with the very authors they stole from and then claiming it’s all legal because a robot read the pages instead of a person.

This is the same Big Tech arrogance that conservatives have warned about for years. These are the same companies that censor speech, manipulate information, and profit from control now turning their sights on creators, hoping to rewrite copyright law to suit their AI ambitions.

It’s time to draw a line. Creators deserve to be compensated. And corporate giants, no matter how innovative, must still obey the law.

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