Illinois journalists, podcasters and voice actors sue nine tech companies over alleged use of their voices to train AI

What happened

In mid-May 2026, nine class-action lawsuits were filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois against Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Samsung, Adobe and ElevenLabs, alleging the companies extracted voiceprints from recordings of Illinois broadcasters, podcasters and audiobook narrators and used them to train AI voice models without consent.

The plaintiffs and claims

• Named plaintiffs include journalists Carol Marin (CBS News, 60 Minutes) and Phil Rogers (NBC Chicago), podcaster Robin Amer, podcasters Yohance Lacour and Alison Flowers, and audiobook narrators Lindsey Dorcus and Victoria Nassif. They are represented by Loevy & Loevy, with Ross Kimbarovsky as lead counsel.
• The core claim is under the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA): the suits allege the companies collected voiceprints — described in the complaints as a mathematical representation of a voice, covering pitch, timbre, resonance, accent and cadence — without notice, written consent or a publicly available retention policy.
• The suits also invoke state right-of-publicity and consumer-fraud statutes, and point to text-to-speech and voice-modulation systems as applications of the collected voice data.
• BIPA statutory damages can reach $1,000 per negligent violation and $5,000 per intentional or reckless violation.

Status

These are allegations in newly filed complaints; no court has ruled on them, and the companies did not respond to requests for comment at the time of filing. The cases test whether voiceprints count as identifiable biometric information under BIPA — an issue that could make voice-based AI training a major new focus of biometric-privacy litigation.