Michael Connelly

Michael Connelly (born 1956) turned a decade as a Los Angeles Times crime reporter into one of the defining bodies of American crime fiction: the Harry Bosch novels, the Mickey Haller “Lincoln Lawyer” series, and their hit screen adaptations, with well over 80 million books sold worldwide. In September 2023 the The Authors Guild invited him to be one of the seventeen named plaintiffs — alongside John Grisham and George R.R. Martin — in its class action against OpenAI, later expanded to include Microsoft, alleging their GPT models were trained on pirated copies of the authors’ novels.

A plaintiff, not a prohibitionist

Connelly’s objection is narrower and sharper than blanket AI doom. Talking to The Irish Times in October 2025, he framed the suit as a matter of law rather than technophobia: copyright protections, in his reading, were simply disregarded when AI companies scraped authors’ books as free training fodder. The complaint he signed onto calls that conduct “flagrant and harmful infringements” and “systematic theft on a mass scale” — the filing itself, not any manifesto, is his core anti-AI act.

Characteristically, he also metabolized the fight into fiction. His 2025 Lincoln Lawyer novel The Proving Ground sends Mickey Haller to court against an AI company whose chatbot gave harmful guidance to a teenager — a plot inspired by the real Garcia v. Character Technologies case. Promoting it, Connelly asked the question that animates the book: “Should there be more guardrails, or better guardrails, as this world evolves and changes in really big ways, in very quick ways?”

That dual posture — suing OpenAI while allowing that “AI is good, and it will change the world for the better” — makes Connelly one of the more measured voices among the author plaintiffs: not against the technology, but against building it on uncompensated, unlicensed use of writers’ life work.