Tech giant Nvidia was hit with a lawsuit in March 2024 by three authors, Brian Keene, Abdi Nazemian, and Stewart O’Nan. The proposed class action alleges that the company used their copyrighted works without authorization to train its artificial intelligence (AI) platform, NeMo. The authors said their books were part of a dataset of about 196,640 books that was used to train NeMo models before the dataset was taken down because of copyright infringement reports.
Updated October 2026. We added the May 2026 court ruling that allowed most of the authors’ claims to proceed, corrected the dataset size, and fixed an error about OpenAI and ChatGPT.
The suit, filed in San Francisco federal court, mentions that this takedown supports their claim and implies that Nvidia admits to infringing on their copyrighted work. As they accuse NeMo of being trained with the dataset, the suit also seeks damages for those living in the United States whose work was used without authorization to train NeMo’s large language models over the last few years. The legal battle now focuses on both artificial intelligence and intellectual property.
The alleged infringed copyrighted works include a wide range of literary material, including Keene’s 2008 novel ‘Ghost Walk,’ Nazemian’s 2019 novel ‘Like a Love Story,’ and O’Nan’s 2007 novella ‘Last Night at the Lobster.’
At the time the suit was filed, Nvidia declined to comment on the claims of Keene, Nazemian, and O’Nan, and lawyers for the authors also did not comment.
Where the case stands
The case, Nazemian v. Nvidia Corporation, is being heard in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. In May 2026, Judge Jon S. Tigar largely denied Nvidia’s motion to dismiss, according to Bloomberg Law and a case summary by the law firm Loeb & Loeb. The authors’ direct and contributory copyright infringement claims tied to Nvidia’s Megatron models, including Megatron 345M, can proceed, and the court refused to dismiss claims about other, not-yet-identified models. The court dismissed the vicarious infringement claim, but the authors may amend and refile it. The ruling does not decide whether Nvidia infringed; the case continues, and its status may have changed since then.
The lawsuit adds Nvidia to the list of companies facing legal action over generative AI. Many writers and media outlets, such as The New York Times, have sued companies that use their work to train models that create new text, images, and audio. Earlier, other companies were also sued for similar reasons, including OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, and Microsoft. Read more: The New York Times sues OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement.
