Alphabet Shareholder Sues Pichai and Other Leaders Over Google's AI Music Training
A shareholder in Alphabet, the parent company of Google, has sued chief executive Sundar Pichai, co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and 10 other directors and executives. The complaint was filed on October 30 in federal court in Chicago, and Music Business Worldwide has reported on its contents.
The case is a shareholder derivative suit. In that kind of case, an investor sues on behalf of the company itself, so any damages awarded would be paid to Alphabet, not to the shareholder. The shareholder is Phil Rosen.
The complaint alleges that the defendants adopted an unlawful business strategy of building Google's AI on copyrighted works and on people's voices. It says millions of sound recordings, musical compositions and lyrics were copied and used without permission to build Google's music models, named as Lyria, Lyria 2, Lyria 3, Mulan and MusicLM.
According to the complaint, the company chose not to spend time and money on lawful licences, the formal permission needed to use copyrighted material. Instead, it allegedly planned to pay damages later, once Alphabet was sued by the holders of copyrights and voiceprints. A voiceprint is a digital pattern that identifies a person's voice. The complaint does not specify a damages figure.
The filing asks the court to order the defendants to pay damages to Alphabet and to return compensation. It also seeks governance changes, including oversight of compliance with copyright law and the Biometric Information Privacy Act, a law that governs how companies collect biometric data such as voiceprints.
The complaint also says Pichai received more than USD 30 million in compensation between 2023 and 2025.
Google is not the first tech company to face claims of this kind. In 2023, Reuters reported a proposed class action accusing Google of misusing personal information and copyrighted material in its AI data scraping. That same year, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee and other authors sued Meta, Microsoft and Bloomberg over the use of their works in AI training. In July 2026, Bloomberg Law reported that 400 small newspapers had sued Microsoft and OpenAI over copyright infringement.
The allegations in the Chicago complaint are claims, and no court has ruled on them.
