A coalition of major publishers and prominent author Scott Turow filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Google in a New York federal court on Tuesday, alleging the tech giant secretly copied millions of literary works to train its Gemini artificial intelligence models.
The complaint by Hachette Book Group, Cengage Learning, Elsevier, and Turow's publishing firm S.C.R.I.B.E. claims Google harvested books through its Google Books service and scraped content from paywalled and pirate sources without permission. The plaintiffs are seeking an injunction to halt the alleged practices, alongside unspecified financial damages. The suit cites internal documents that purportedly warned Google staff that training AI on copyrighted books was "highly problematic" and risked up to $100 billion in fines.
The legal action is the latest in an escalating battle between content creators and AI developers. The same group of publishers previously sued Meta in May 2025 over similar allegations, while Anthropic agreed last September to pay at least $1.5 billion to settle comparable claims from authors and publishers.