Megatron Mimicry: Authors Sue Microsoft Over Pirated Books in AI Training

Copyright Infringement | Fair Use Debate | Industry-Wide Implications In late June 2025, a coalition of high-profile authors—including Kai Bird, Jia Tolentino, and Daniel Okrent—filed a landmark lawsuit in the Southern District of New York. The plaintiffs allege Microsoft trained its Megatron large language model (LM) on nearly 200,000 pirated books, producing outputs that