Six textbook authors sue OpenAI and Microsoft over alleged use of pirated textbooks to train AI models

What happened

On August 14, 2026, six textbook authors filed a proposed class-action lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York (case 1:26-cv-06966-UA). Lead plaintiff Alan J. Marcus is a finance professor at Boston College; the other plaintiffs are Michael Sullivan, Kenneth S. Saladin, Zvi Bodie, Kevin T. Patton, Lion Den Inc., and Dana Loewy, suing individually and on behalf of all similarly situated textbook authors.

Allegations

• The complaint alleges OpenAI downloaded the authors' textbooks from pirate websites (shadow libraries), including Library Genesis, copied them into datasets, and used them to train large language models including ChatGPT.
• It centers on two datasets, Books1 and Books2, allegedly containing ebook files downloaded from Library Genesis.
• The plaintiffs allege OpenAI developed software to remove copyright notices and other identifying information to conceal the use.
• Microsoft is named for allegedly building the infrastructure on which OpenAI trained its models and profiting by building those models into products such as Bing Chat and Copilot, including via Azure data centers in New York.
• The suit seeks to represent every textbook author whose copyrighted work OpenAI or Microsoft allegedly copied, and alleges textbooks make up about a quarter of all works the companies copied.

Scope note

All infringement allegations are plaintiff claims in a newly filed complaint, not court findings. The suit was filed August 14, 2026; it resurfaced in campus coverage October 25-26, 2026, but was absent from the collector's 232-item census, so it is submitted here as new coverage.