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Two authors filed a class action lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging that the company used copyrighted books from illegal 'shadow libraries' to train its ChatGPT model without permission. The lawsuit claims this constitutes copyright infringement and seeks damages for a class of affected authors. This case is part of a broader trend of legal challenges regarding the data used to train generative AI systems.
Two authors alleged in a class action lawsuit OpenAI infringed authors' copyrights by incorporating illegal "shadow libraries" offering copyrighted books without permission in the training data of its generative LLMs, such as ChatGPT.
Domain classification, causal taxonomy, severity scores, and national security assessments were LLM-classified and may contain errors.
AI systems capable of creating economic or cultural value, including through reproduction of human innovation or creativity (e.g., art, music, writing, coding, invention), destabilizing economic and social systems that rely on human effort. The ubiquity of AI-generated content may lead to reduced appreciation for human skills, disruption of creative and knowledge-based industries, and homogenization of cultural experiences.
The unauthorized training of ChatGPT on copyrighted books devalues the creative effort and intellectual property of authors by reproducing their work without compensation.
Human
Due to a decision or action made by humans
Intentional
Due to an expected outcome from pursuing a goal
Pre-deployment
Occurring before the AI is deployed
The risk of copyright infringement was caused by the intentional decision of humans at OpenAI to train ChatGPT on copyrighted books before the model was deployed.
Authors Paul Tremblay and Mona Awad filed a class action lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging unauthorized use of copyrighted books to train ChatGPT. While the case highlights critical unresolved legal questions around intellectual property and training data for strategic AI models, its direct national security implications are currently minor.
The report describes ChatGPT as a generative artificial-intelligence system that responds to users text prompts in a conversational way, which aligns with the Assistant behavior type as it augments human capabilities through conversational interaction.
Limited Risk: The system is described as ChatGPT, which is a chatbot. Under the EU AI Act, chatbots are classified as Limited Risk (Level 3) and are subject to specific transparency obligations.
ChatGPT is a generative AI system designed to respond to text prompts in a conversational way and generate summaries of books, functioning primarily as a writing assistant and question answering tool.
The report clearly outlines the legal dispute, the parties involved (OpenAI and the authors), the specific AI system (ChatGPT), and the core allegation of unauthorized training on copyrighted books. There is little ambiguity regarding the facts of the lawsuit, though the legal outcome remains pending.
The incident could be interpreted as a standard copyright dispute rather than an AI safety incident, but the systemic implications for generative AI training data make it highly relevant to AI governance.
Technology
Generative AI Training Methods
Models require massive datasets to learn language patterns effectively.
Accurate Summary Generation
System reconstructs detailed book content, proving ingestion of works.
Data Inputs
Use of Shadow Libraries
Training data included illegal sources containing copyrighted books.
Unlicensed Data Scraping
Scraping internet data without verifying copyright or getting consent.
Process and Methods
Inadequate Data Provenance
No robust filtering to exclude copyrighted materials from training sets.
Lack of Rights Clearance
No process to obtain explicit permission from copyright holders.
Management
Rapid Scaling Prioritization
Focusing on rapid deployment over resolving copyright compliance.
Regulatory Environment
Ambiguous Fair Use Laws
Unclear legal boundaries regarding AI training on copyrighted works.
AI system involved
Identified by automated extraction; can differ from the alleged developers above.
