Scott Turow

Scott Turow (born 1949) has spent his whole career straddling law and letters: a former federal prosecutor whose 1987 debut Presumed Innocent effectively invented the modern legal thriller, a practicing attorney through decades of bestsellers, and a past president of the The Authors Guild. That résumé made him a natural named plaintiff when the Guild and sixteen fellow authors — including John Grisham and George R.R. Martin — sued OpenAI in September 2023 for training GPT on what the complaint calls pirated books and “systematic theft on a mass scale.”

One author, three lawsuits

Turow has since become the publishing industry’s most persistent AI litigant. In May 2026 he and his company S.C.R.I.B.E joined Hachette, Macmillan, McGraw Hill, Elsevier, and Cengage in a class action against Meta and Mark Zuckerberg personally, alleging Llama was trained on millions of books torrented from pirate sites like LibGen and Anna’s Archive — with the complaint quoting a Meta employee that “if we license once [sic] single book, we won’t be able to lean into the fair use strategy.” In July 2026 he and several of the same publishers filed again, this time against Google over its Gemini models.

His statement to NPR on the Meta filing distilled the argument: the bold future promised by AI was “created with stolen words,” and the theft is more shameful for having been committed by one of the world’s richest corporations. Among the works Meta allegedly ingested is Presumed Innocent itself.

The legal terrain he is fighting on is genuinely unsettled: in June 2025 a federal judge granted Meta summary judgment against a different group of authors in Richard Kadrey’s case for lack of proven market harm, while Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement with authors that September showed piracy-based training carries real liability. Turow’s suits — brought with publishers and their deeper evidentiary records — are built to close the gaps those earlier rulings exposed.