Industry & Advocacy News
July 17, 2025
On Wednesday, July 16, bestselling author David Baldacci delivered powerful testimony before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, laying bare the devastating impact of AI companies’ systematic theft of copyrighted works. “I truly felt like someone had backed up a truck to my imagination and stolen everything I’d ever created,” Baldacci told the subcommittee, describing his discovery that AI companies had pirated his entire body of work to train their systems.
The moment of recognition came when Baldacci’s son asked ChatGPT to write a plot that read like a Baldacci novel. “In about five seconds, three pages came up that had elements of pretty much every book I’d ever written, including plot lines, character names, narrative, the works.”
The hearing, titled “Too Big to Prosecute? Examining the AI Industry’s Mass Ingestion of Copyrighted Works for AI Training,” aimed to shine a spotlight on tech companies’ practice of copying millions of books from notorious pirate websites. Baldacci’s testimony represents the voices of hundreds of thousands of authors whose life’s work has been pirated by AI companies without permission or compensation. The Authors Guild has worked closely with Baldacci and other authors to ensure that Congress understands both the legal violations and the human cost of this unprecedented theft.
Author David Baldacci preparing for his Senate testimony.
Baldacci addressed AI companies’ claim that their systems learn like human readers. As someone who spent decades reading other authors like John Irving, he explained that unlike AI, he can’t remember every line Irving wrote or perfectly reproduce his work. “None of my novels read remotely like an Irving novel,” Baldacci testified, highlighting the crucial distinction between human inspiration and digital copying.
He went on to explain that AI companies deliberately sought out piracy sites to obtain copyrighted books, since legitimate books aren’t freely available online. They turned to notorious sites like Library Genesis and Z-Library—whose operators were arrested by the FBI—to access millions of stolen works.
Beyond the legal violations, the economic impact is devastating. AI-generated books already flood the market daily, and the tide is only growing larger. As Baldacci explained, “That will mean lower profits for publishers, and less money to spend on new, emerging writers. That hurts all of us.” And this comes at a time when authors’ earnings were already declining, with full-time authors’ median writing-related income at just over $20,000 in the Guild’s most recent survey.
Baldacci also exposed the hypocrisy of AI companies demanding copyright protection for their own code while claiming fair use over authors’ entire bodies of work. As he put it, if he stole their algorithms, they’d unleash lawsuits, but “if, as AI companies contend, fair use is actually my entire body of work, there is no more copyright protection for anyone.”
Mary Rasenberger, CEO of the Authors Guild, with author David Baldacci (center), and Ralph W. Eubanks, President of the Authors Guild.
Other witnesses revealed the scope of corporate involvement. Maxwell Pritt of Boies Schiller Flexner LLP, who represents authors in ongoing litigation, shared evidence of what he called “likely the largest domestic piracy of intellectual property in our nation’s history,” involving “hundreds of terabytes of data and many millions of works.”
Internal company documents showed this went to the highest levels. “At Meta, company documents show that Mark Zuckerberg himself made the call,” Pritt testified. At Anthropic, documents revealed “a blatant disregard for our copyright laws,” with company leadership “preferring to pirate books to avoid or delay the ‘legal/practice/business slog,’ as Anthropic’s co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei put it.”
Subcommittee chair Senator Josh Hawley was blunt about the deception: “AI companies are training their models on stolen material, period.”
Left: Rasenberger and Baldacci speak with Senator Josh Hawley, chair of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism. Right: Rasenberger and Baldacci speak with Senator Peter Welch.
The Authors Guild has been working for several years with others in the copyright industries to identify concrete solutions: legislation to cut off access to foreign piracy sites, transparency requirements forcing AI companies to disclose unlicensed works used in training, and clear labeling of AI-generated content.
Mary Rasenberger, the CEO of the Guild, and Ralph W. Eubanks, the president of the Guild, were also in attendance to support Baldacci and speak with senators. “It was powerful to hear leaders in Congress make the same points we’ve made to them for years,” said Rasenberger. “They’ve heard us and agree.”
As Baldacci concluded, this isn’t about stifling innovation—it’s about basic respect for the law and creators’ rights. Books have transformed civilization, and “if you want to bet on which side is more transformational, for all of us, I will bet on books every single time.”
Watch video of the hearing and read the full witness testimonies here.
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