Salesforce is being sued by two novelists who claim the cloud-computing giant used their books without permission to train its xGen AI models to process language, according to a complaint filed Wednesday.
Molly Tanzer and Jennifer Gilmore allege Salesforce infringed copyrights by feeding their work into software designed to process language. The lawsuit claims the company used thousands of pirated books written by the plaintiffs and others for AI training purposes.
TechInformed has reached out to Salesforce for comment. The case joins dozens of similar lawsuits filed by authors, news outlets and content owners against tech companies including OpenAI, Microsoft and Meta over alleged misuse of copyrighted material for AI training data.
“It’s important that companies that use copyrighted material for AI products are transparent,” attorney Joseph Saveri, who represents the authors, told Reuters. “It’s also only fair that our clients are fairly compensated when this happens.”
The lawsuit pointed to past statements by Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff criticizing AI companies for using “stolen” training data. Benioff previously said paying content creators would be “very easy to do,” according to the complaint.
Anthropic settled a separate authors’ lawsuit for $1.5 billion in August, marking a landmark agreement in the emerging legal battle over AI training practices.
