Publishers Hachette and Elsevier sue Google for AI copyright infringement

Hachette Book Group and Elsevier, two of the United States’ largest publishing houses, have filed a federal lawsuit against Google Inc., accusing the tech giant of unlawfully using millions of copyrighted books to train its Gemini artificial‑intelligence model. The complaint, lodged in the Northern District of California, alleges that Google harvested text from the publishers’ catalogues without obtaining the required licenses, violating U.S. copyright law and seeking both injunctive relief to halt further use of the material and monetary damages for past infringements. The suit claims that Google’s Gemini, a competitor to other large‑language models, was built on a dataset that includes protected works from Hachette’s fiction and nonfiction titles as well as Elsevier’s scientific journals and textbooks.

The filing arrives amid a wave of litigation targeting AI developers for similar practices, including recent actions against OpenAI and Microsoft. Google maintains that its data‑collection methods complied with existing licensing agreements and that the use of publicly available text falls under permissible fair‑use doctrines. The case is expected to proceed through pre‑trial motions, with both parties likely to present expert testimony on the scope of the alleged infringement and its impact on the publishing industry. Observers note that the outcome could set a precedent for how copyrighted content is accessed and utilized in the training of future AI systems.