In his words
Defendants, by and through their operation of ChatGPT, benefit commercially and profit handsomely from their unauthorized and illegal use of Plaintiffs’ and Class members’ copyrighted works.
Millions of copyrighted books, articles, essays, and poetry provide the “food” for AI systems, endless meals for which there has been no bill.
Biography
Michael Chabon (b. 1963) won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and is the author of Wonder Boys, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and Moonglow. He has also written extensively for film and television, including serving as showrunner of Star Trek: Picard.
Suing OpenAI and Meta
In July 2023 Chabon signed the The Authors Guild open letter demanding that AI companies obtain permission and pay authors for training on their books. Weeks later he escalated: on September 8, 2023 he became lead plaintiff in Chabon v. OpenAI, a class action filed in the Northern District of California alongside playwright David Henry Hwang, Matthew Klam, Rachel Louise Snyder and Ayelet Waldman, followed on September 12 by a parallel suit against Meta.
OpenAI incorporated Plaintiffs’ and Class members’ copyrighted works in datasets used to train its GPT models powering its ChatGPT product. Indeed, when ChatGPT is prompted, it generates not only summaries, but in-depth analyses of the themes present in Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works, which is only possible if the underlying GPT model was trained using Plaintiffs’ works.
The complaints alleged direct and vicarious copyright infringement, DMCA violations, unjust enrichment and negligence, and asked the court to order destruction of models trained on copyrighted works. Both suits were folded into the larger consolidated author litigation — the OpenAI claims joining the cases brought by Sarah Silverman and the Authors Guild, the Meta claims merging into Kadrey v. Meta, where a judge granted Meta summary judgment in June 2025 while pointedly declining to bless AI training on copyrighted books as lawful.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/michael-chabon