David Baldacci

David Baldacci (born 1960) is a former Washington trial lawyer from Richmond, Virginia, whose 1996 debut Absolute Power launched one of the most commercially successful careers in American fiction — roughly sixty novels and more than 150 million copies sold. In September 2023 he became one of seventeen named author plaintiffs, alongside John Grisham, George R.R. Martin, and Jodi Picoult, in the The Authors Guild class action accusing OpenAI (and later Microsoft) of training GPT models on pirated copies of their books — conduct the complaint calls “systematic theft on a mass scale.”

The truck backed up to his imagination

Baldacci’s conversion from bystander to litigant began at home: his son asked ChatGPT to write a plot that read like a David Baldacci novel. As he told the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism on July 16, 2025, “In about five seconds three pages came up that had elements of pretty much every book I’d ever written, including plot lines, character names, narrative, the works.” That, he testified, was how he learned that AI companies had fed most of his novels into their systems without permission — sourced not from bookstores but from pirate libraries like Library Genesis and Z-Library.

His testimony went beyond personal grievance: he called the mass ingestion of pirated books “the largest criminal-level copyright infringement ever perpetrated in this country,” warned that AI-generated knockoffs now appear on release day to siphon sales from real books, and urged Congress to pass site-blocking, training-data transparency, and AI-labeling legislation. He also rejected the analogy that AI training is just like a young writer learning from favorite authors — he read everything John Irving wrote, he noted, yet none of his novels read remotely like Irving, because humans read for love, not verbatim recall.