The Creative Approach Behind Penske’s AI Lawsuit

June was a bad month for publishers trying to protect their copyrighted material from AI. First, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled that Anthropic was not breaking the law when it trained its Claude chatbot on copyrighted books. A week later, a federal lawsuit against Meta by authors including Sarah Silverman and ​​Ta-Nehisi Coates was thrown out, for using arguments the judge deemed invalid.

Now an innovative lawsuit by Penske Media Corporation, which is home to publications like Rolling Stone, Deadline, and Billboard, is trying a new tack. Rather than suing over the use of copyrighted material, Penske is relying on an antitrust claim—arguing that the automated results from Google’s AI Overviews unfairly compete with the sites, because users are less likely to click on links when the information is predigested for them. The case builds on previous lawsuits, including one filed by the education tech company Chegg, making similar claims, and another in which a federal court in DC found that Google held an illegal monopoly over search.