Alphabet shareholder sues Pichai and 12 directors over alleged unlawful AI training, including Lyria music models

What happened

Alphabet shareholder Phil Rosen filed a 79-page shareholder derivative complaint on 30 October 2026 in federal court in Chicago against CEO Sundar Pichai, co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and ten other Alphabet directors and executives, over how Google trained its AI models. In a derivative suit the shareholder sues on the company's behalf, so any damages recovered would be paid to Alphabet itself rather than to Rosen. The complaint does not specify a damages figure; it asks the court to order the defendants to pay damages to Alphabet, hand back compensation, and force governance changes including effective oversight of compliance with copyright and biometric-privacy laws.

What the complaint alleges

The complaint alleges the defendants adopted an unlawful business strategy of building Google's AI on copyrighted works and people's voices without licenses, following an 'ask forgiveness not approval' model using a pirated dataset rather than a clean dataset. It alleges Google copied millions of sound recordings, musical compositions, and lyrics, ingested them from YouTube, stripped copyright information, and used them to build Lyria, Lyria 2, Lyria 3, Mulan, and MusicLM. It says MusicLM, introduced in January 2023, was trained on five million audio clips totaling 280,000 hours of music without identifying the recordings, rights holders, or licenses. It also alleges voice products such as Gemini Live were built on hundreds of thousands of hours of human speech recordings without the consent required by Illinois' Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), and that Alphabet's board misled shareholders in proxy statements about its AI oversight, while buying back 1.147 billion shares for USD 169.6 billion between April 2023 and November 2025 at prices allegedly inflated by the undisclosed conduct.

Boundary

All of the above are allegations in a complaint, not court findings. Much of the complaint's music section draws on a proposed class action filed by independent musicians against Google in the same court in March 2026, a separate case in which Google has argued the musicians granted a license through YouTube's terms of service.