Salesforce Faces Lawsuit from Authors Over AI Training on Books

October 20, 2025
Two authors have filed a proposed class action lawsuit against Salesforce, alleging the company used their books without permission to train its AI models. The complaint claims Salesforce’s xGen and CodeGen models were trained on datasets containing pirated books.

Two authors have filed a proposed class action lawsuit against Salesforce Inc., alleging that the company used their copyrighted books without permission to train its artificial intelligence software, reports Reuters.

Novelists Molly Tanzer and Jennifer Gilmore claim in their complaint that Salesforce’s xGen AI models were trained using thousands of books taken without authorization. The lawsuit, filed in San Francisco, accuses the company of infringing their copyrights by incorporating their works into datasets used for language model training.

According to the filing, Salesforce allegedly used datasets containing pirated books, including the Books3 dataset, as part of the pre-training material for its CodeGen and xGen large language models. The complaint marks the first copyright lawsuit against Salesforce and the 53rd filed in the United States against AI companies over similar claims.

A Salesforce spokesperson declined to comment on the case. The authors are represented by the Joseph Saveri Law Firm, which has filed multiple copyright suits against AI developers on behalf of content creators.

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