A group of publishers and authors have filed a class-action lawsuit against Google, accusing the tech giant of using their copyrighted works to train its artificial intelligence platform, Gemini.

The group of plaintiffs, which includes Hachette, Cengage, Elsevier, author Scott Turow and SCRIBE, also alleges that Google intentionally removed or changed copyright information from these works to “conceal… that its Gemini models were trained with stolen materials,” according to the lawsuit.

This lawsuit is just one of many complaints that publishers, authors and other copyright holders have filed against artificial intelligence companies such as Google, Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic.

While many of these lawsuits are still pending, two early court decisions in California have favored AI companies, ruling that the use of copyrighted works for AI training is considered “fair use” under US copyright law that has not been updated since before the existence of the Internet.

However, Anthropic was fined $1.5 billion for pirating the works it trained on, the largest payout in the history of US copyright law. About half a million writers were eligible for payments of at least $3,000. However, many authors opted out of the settlement so they could take further legal action over AI training.

The California judges’ decisions don’t bode well for how other courts might view tech companies’ fair use defense, but the conflict is too nuanced for these rulings to set indisputable precedent. The lawsuit against Google was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, giving a different judge a chance to weigh in.

In the case of Google, publishers have a more nuanced and long-term relationship with the company. The lawsuit explains that publishers and authors have a long history of providing Google with copyrighted works for the specific purpose of making books searchable through Google Books. These search results do not allow users to view entire books. Instead, they provide access to short excerpts from the book along with bibliographic information. The plaintiffs claim that Google trained Gemini with copies of these books, as well as books uploaded to the Google Play store, although it never received permission to do so.

“Google unlawfully copied works from all of these limited scope AI training programs, knowing that it lacked authorization to do so,” the lawsuit reads.

The plaintiffs also cite an internal Google document that allegedly states that the use of copyrighted books for AI training could be “very problematic for Google” and could result in “between $1 billion and $100 billion in potential fines.”

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.