An Alphabet shareholder has sued Sundar Pichai, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and 10 other directors and executives at Google‘s parent company over how Google trained its AI models.
The lawsuit claims they adopted “an unlawful business strategy” of building Google’s AI on copyrighted works and people’s voices – including recordings, compositions, and lyrics allegedly used to train the Lyria music models.
Shareholder Phil Rosen filed the complaint on October 30 in federal court in Chicago.
The 79-page filing, obtained by MBW, can be read in full here.
Rosen is suing on Alphabet’s behalf in what is known as a shareholder derivative suit, which means any damages recovered would be paid to Alphabet itself rather than to him.
“The strategy was carefully crafted to avoid spending the time and money necessary to obtain lawful licenses or permission from the copyright holders, and instead to simply pay damages later when Alphabet was sued by the copyright holders and commercial voiceprint holders,” the complaint alleges.
It alleges that all 13 defendants knew of the alleged violations, adding: “Rather than utilize a clean dataset that did not include copyrighted books, cartoons, illustrations, digital images, and commercialized voiceprints, Defendants followed the ‘ask forgiveness not approval’ model and adopted and implemented an unlawful plan to use a pirated dataset to develop the Company’s AI services.”
“The strategy was carefully crafted to avoid spending the time and money necessary to obtain lawful licenses or permission from the copyright holders, and instead to simply pay damages later when Alphabet was sued by the copyright holders and commercial voiceprint holders.”
Phil Rosen‘s complaint
Besides Pichai, Page, and Brin, the defendants include Alphabet Chair John L. Hennessy and six other directors, along with CFO Anat Ashkenazi, President and Chief Investment Officer Ruth M. Porat, and Kent Walker, Alphabet’s President of Global Affairs and Chief Legal Officer.
Rosen’s complaint does not specify a damages figure.
It asks the court to order the defendants to pay damages to Alphabet, to hand back compensation, and to force changes to the company’s governance, including steps to “ensure the establishment of effective oversight of compliance with copyright and BIPA laws.”
BIPA is Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act, which requires companies to give written notice and obtain a written release before collecting biometric data, such as voiceprints.
According to the complaint, Pichai alone received more than USD $30 million in compensation from 2023 to 2025.
If Rosen wins, Alphabet’s leaders could be ordered to compensate the company for the costs of the AI copyright suits it faces, and the board could be required to put formal copyright oversight in place over how Google trains its AI.
The complaint’s music allegations focus on YouTube, which Alphabet owns.
“Alphabet and Google have engaged in copying millions of copyrighted sound recordings, musical compositions, and lyrics,” the complaint states.
“Google ingested, copied, processed, and commercially exploited these works without permission or compensation. These copies were used to build Lyria, Lyria 2, Lyria 3, Mulan, and MusicLM.”
According to the complaint, Google extracted audio from the recordings, converted it into machine-readable formats, and cut it into clips for training.
“Google also stripped out all copyright information that identified the artists and their copyright notices. Google undertook this process without permission from, or compensation to, all copyright holders,” the complaint states.
It says MusicLM, introduced in January 2023, was trained on five million audio clips totaling 280,000 hours of music, adding: “Google did not identify the specific recordings, rights holders, or licenses in this 280,000-hour training corpus.”
It notes that four researchers Google named as core contributors to Lyria later left to launch Udio, which the RIAA sued on behalf of the major labels in June 2024.
The complaint alleges that Alphabet has not disclosed that its music models were built on copyrighted works, adding that “there is no public evidence that any artist endorsed, authorized, or was compensated for the output.”
It also cites a January 2024 Billboard report that Google had trained its music model on copyrighted major-label recordings, and says Google then sought permission only from “the largest and most sophisticated players in the industry and not individual copyright holders.”
Much of the complaint’s music section draws on a proposed class action that a group of independent musicians filed against Google in the same court in March, and some passages repeat that lawsuit’s wording.
Google has asked the court to throw out that case, arguing that by accepting YouTube’s terms of service, the musicians granted a license that extends to YouTube’s “Affiliates,” Google among them.
The complaint also claims Alphabet built voice products such as Gemini Live on “hundreds of thousands of hours of human speech recordings” without the consent BIPA requires.
The complaint accuses Alphabet’s board of misleading shareholders in the proxy statements issued before annual meetings at which directors stand for re-election.
In a passage on “Responsible AI” in its 2024 proxy, Alphabet said its board received regular updates from senior managers “who are immersed, on a daily basis, in the implementation of our AI Principles that are designed to provide safe, secure, and trustworthy AI development across products.”
The complaint says the board dropped those statements from its 2025 and 2026 proxies, alleging: “The Director Defendants eliminated these statements because they were well aware that they should not have been placed in the 2024 Proxy Statement.”
“These statements were materially false and misleading because they led the market and the Company’s shareholders to believe that Alphabet had complied with all laws, including copyright and BIPA laws, in the development of its AI,” the complaint alleges.
The 2025 proxy did, however, include another statement the complaint calls false and misleading. Opposing a shareholder proposal for a report on AI data usage, Alphabet’s board told investors, as quoted in the complaint: “Google operates an authoritative, comprehensive, and auditable system of record for all of our AI assets, including our models, our applications, and the workflows that produce them.
“This system is foundational to our commitment to AI safety and governance. We annotate all AI assets with detailed tracking of data origins and usage (auditable lineage).”
The complaint further claims that Alphabet bought back 1.147 billion of its own shares between April 2023 and November 2025, at a total cost of USD $169.6 billion.
“All of these repurchases were made at times when the Defendants knew, but had failed to disclose, the Company’s copyright and BIPA infringement on its AI platforms and datasets,” Rosen’s complaint states. “As a result, the Company paid artificially inflated prices to buy its own shares.”
“This tidal wave of litigation filed against AI developers like Alphabet served as blazing red flags alerting Defendants of the need to prevent Alphabet from committing and continuing to commit the same unlawful conduct,” the complaint states.
The cases it cites include the major labels’ lawsuits against Suno and Udio, and the two lawsuits that UMG, Concord, and ABKCO have filed against Anthropic.
The complaint attributes Anthropic’s USD $1.5 billion payment to the publishers’ first lawsuit, filed in 2023.
As MBW reported, Anthropic agreed to pay that sum in September 2025 to settle a separate class action brought by book authors.
One of the defendants, Kent Walker, published a Google policy paper in June arguing that AI training on publicly available web data should be protected by fair use, a US legal defense for some unlicensed uses of copyrighted works.
“Using publicly available web data for training models is a transformative, non-expressive use – like an art student taking inspiration from walking through a gallery – that should remain protected under fair use in the U.S. and text-and-data-mining exceptions abroad,” Google’s paper states.
In August, a shareholder of the same name filed a similar derivative suit against Apple‘s executives and board members, according to Bloomberg Law.Music Business Worldwide
