New Delhi: Multiple publishers and authors, including the Hachette Book Group, have filed a class action lawsuit against Google for stealing millions of copyrighted books and articles for training its artificial intelligence (AI) models. In its opening lines, the suit, which was filed in New York, states: “Desperate to maintain its online dominance, Google abandoned its early motto of ‘Don’t be evil’ and engaged in one of the most prolific infringements of copyrighted materials in history. Google first illegally copied millions of books and journal articles to assemble a vast trove of copyrighted materials for its own commercial use.”The plaintiffs – namely Hachette Book Group, Cengage Learning, Elsevier, author Scott Turow and his publishing house S.C.R.I.B.E. Inc. – have alleged that Google took copyrighted book and articles provided to them strictly for use only in Google Books, Google Play Books and Google Scholar, and secretly copied them. Google, they alleged, “copied those stolen works many times over to train its multi-billion-dollar generative AI system called Gemini”.The Silicon Valley giant, the publishers alleged, repeatedly used the unauthorised copies of these works to train its successive AI models.They also said that Google had internal discussions where it was flagged that using publisher-provided copyrighted books from Google Play Books in connection with its AI was “highly problematic for Google,” warning of “$10Bs-$100Bs in potential fines.”‘Unprecedented scale and speed’The lawsuit mentions that copyright owners “told Google that it was not authorized to use works provided for these limited-purpose programs outside of the scope-limited programs for which the works had been provided”, including to train it AI models.Google also allegedly used copyrighted works from pirate sites and from behind paywalls in its C4 training dataset, and it used all this to build an AI system that competes with the works Google has copied.“The scale and speed at which Gemini can create books and compete with human writers is unprecedented, and it can only do that because Google copied Plaintiffs’ and the Class’s works to train its AI,” the publishers have alleged.“Gemini even tailors outputs to mimic the expressive elements and creative choices of specific authors,” the lawsuit says. ‘Google profiting from infringement’The publishers have alleged that ultimately, Google has profited, “and continues to profit massively”, from thishistoric infringement. They noted that on October 2025, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, reported its first-ever $100 billion revenue quarter, which was driven by Google’s AI business. In the same report, the company announced it was “bringing AI to more people and developers than anyone else” and that the “Gemini app now has over 650 million monthly active users,” representing “more than 20x growth in a year.”The publishers further alleged that Alphabet’s more recent financial reporting confirmed that this infringing AI business was “only getting bigger and generating more revenue for Google”.Similar lawsuits against Meta, AnthropicWhile this is the latest copyright infringement lawsuit brought against AI developers, Le Monde reported that in May, these publishers had also sued social media titan Meta on similar grounds in a New York court.In September last year, a US judge had approved a $1.5 billion settlement between Anthropic and several authors who had claimed the company illegally copied their work to train its AI model, Claude. However, the settlement partially favoured Anthropic as a judge ruled that the company’s use of books to train Claude was transformative enough to constitute “fair use” under US law, while noting that the use of pirated materials was not.Meta similarly won a partial victory last year, in a lawsuit filed by comedian Sarah Silverman, author Ta-Nehisi Coates and others. A San Francisco judge ruled that its use of copyrighted materials was “fair use”.Earlier this year, thousands of authors including Kazuo Ishiguro, Philippa Gregory and Richard Osman published an “empty” book to protest against AI firms using their work without permission. The Guardian reported that about 10,000 writers contributed to this book, titled Don’t Steal This Book. The only content in it was a list of their names.