San Francisco, CA – On Tuesday, eight individuals aiming to represent millions of internet users and copyright holders took Google to court, accusing Google’s unauthorized AI data scraping. The current lawsuit suggests that Google could potentially face liabilities of at least $5 billion.

“Google does not own the Internet, it does not own our creative work, it does not own our expressions of our personhood, pictures of our families and children, or anything else simply because we share it online,” said plaintiffs’ attorney Ryan Clarkson in a statement.

Clarkson’s law firm had recently filed a similar lawsuit against Microsoft-backed OpenAI this month.

In response, Google’s general counsel, Halimah Delaine Prado, stated that the company has been “clear for years that we use data from public sources – like information published to the open web and public datasets – to train the AI models behind services like Google Translate, responsibly and in line with our AI Principles.” 

Delaine Prado defended the company’s practices, “American law supports using public information to create new beneficial users, and we look forward to refuting these baseless claims.”

The lawsuit demands court intervention for Google to allow users to opt out of its “illicit data collection,” to delete the existing data, and to compensate data owners.