On Tuesday, July 15th, 2026, multiple book publishers including Hachette Book Group, Cengage Learning, Elsevier, author Scott Turow, and his publishing company S.C.R.I.B.E. filed a lawsuit in New York against Google. They accuse the tech giant of illegally copying millions of copyrighted works that were originally provided to Google Books and other services for limited purposes. According to the lawsuit, Google used this content to train its artificial intelligence model, Gemini.

The plaintiffs claim that the content generated by Gemini directly competes with the original authors' work. The lawsuit states, "The scale and speed at which Gemini can create books and compete with human writers is unprecedented," and adds that "Gemini even tailors outputs to mimic the expressive elements and creative choices of specific authors."

The lawsuit requests class action status, an injunction, and an unspecified amount of damages. This legal action follows a similar lawsuit filed in May against Meta by some of the same publishers on comparable grounds in a New York court.

Additionally, a related case saw a US judge in September approve a $1.5 billion settlement between Anthropic and several authors who alleged that the San Francisco-based company illegally copied their work to train its AI model, Claude.

This lawsuit highlights ongoing legal disputes over how AI developers use copyrighted books and other creative works to build their systems and the implications for authorship and copyright.

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