Publishers sue SpaceX Super Intelligence over Grok training
Three complaints in the Northern District of California allege Grok was trained on books from shadow libraries and on scans of purchased print copies; the plaintiffs reject class-action form.
- Courts & copyright
- Minor
Three publishers sued the company behind Grok, now called SpaceX Super Intelligence, for copyright infringement in the Northern District of California. The litigation tracker Chat GPT Is Eating the World counted the filings as Cognella, Inc.; Cambronne Inc. and others; and Chicken Soup for the Soul LLC, brought by the firms Stris & Maher and Freedman Normand Friedland. The Cognella complaint, filed on 4 November, was the one reviewed for this entry; the other two were not. The defendants are listed as SpaceX Super Intelligence Corp. and two affiliates, formerly SpaceXAI and xAI entities. They had not responded in the documents reviewed.
Cognella, an academic publisher, brings four counts: direct infringement through downloading pirated copies, direct infringement through scanning physical books, contributory infringement, and removal of copyright management information. It alleges that xAI trained Grok on books taken from shadow libraries such as LibGen, partly by torrenting, and that it bought print books, scanned them and trained on the digital copies without a licence. For the scanning claim the complaint cites a July 2026 post by Elon Musk on X, which it says shows xAI scans physical books; the post itself was not read for this entry. It also quotes Grok’s own answers about its training data and xAI’s disclosures under the EU AI Act. These are allegations. The complaint seeks damages, a permanent injunction and other relief.
The scanning count tests a point a judge has already ruled on. In the 2025 Bartz v. Anthropic ruling, Judge Alsup held that Anthropic’s scanning of books it had bought was fair use. The tracker says the new complaints take the opposite position, and the Cognella complaint cites Bartz for the facts of Anthropic’s scanning programme. The plaintiffs also decline to proceed as a class, arguing they want individual statutory damages decided by a jury rather than being “swept into sprawling class settlements”; the tracker says the same firm filed five near-identical suits for 292 authors against Meta, now before Judge Chhabria, and quotes plaintiffs’ firms expecting about 1,000 plaintiffs in total.
The tracker said SpaceX “has finally joined the AI Copyright Wars” and counted 164 US copyright suits against AI companies in total. A December 2025 complaint alleging Grok was trained on pirated books, which the Cognella complaint cites, was severed and dismissed as to xAI in June 2026 on joinder grounds, according to the complaint.