THE ESSENTIALS IN 30 SECONDS

  • Shareholder Phil Rosen filed a 79-page derivative complaint on October 30 in federal court in Chicago against 13 Alphabet directors and officers, including Sundar Pichai, Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
  • It alleges Google trained Lyria, MusicLM and voice products such as Gemini Live on copyrighted music and recorded speech without licences or the consent Illinois' biometric privacy law requires.
  • The suit also targets proxy disclosures and $169.6 billion of share buybacks; damages would go to Alphabet, and no response from Google had been reported.

The legal fight over how AI models are trained has reached Alphabet's boardroom. On October 30, shareholder Phil Rosen filed a 79-page complaint in the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, in Chicago, against 13 of the company's directors and officers, as reported by Music Business Worldwide (MBW) and Bloomberg Law.

What the complaint alleges

The defendants include chief executive Sundar Pichai, co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, chair John L. Hennessy and six other directors, as well as finance chief Anat Ashkenazi, president Ruth Porat and chief legal officer Kent Walker. According to MBW, the suit argues that they adopted a strategy of building Google's AI on copyrighted works and people's voices, choosing to pay damages later rather than license material up front.

Music sits at the centre of the case. The complaint says Google copied millions of recordings, compositions and lyrics to develop its Lyria models (versions 1 to 3), Mulan and MusicLM, cutting audio into clips and stripping out copyright information. It notes that MusicLM, unveiled in January 2023, was described as trained on about 280,000 hours of audio whose sources were never identified. Separately, it alleges that voice products such as Gemini Live were built on hundreds of thousands of hours of recorded speech without the written consent required by Illinois' Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), which covers voiceprints.

Governance and buyback claims

Bloomberg Law reports that the suit accuses the board of misleading investors in annual filings. MBW says it points to a 2024 proxy statement describing board oversight of AI, language later dropped, and to a 2025 description of Google's data-tracking system that the complaint calls false. It also claims Alphabet repurchased 1.147 billion shares for $169.6 billion between April 2023 and November 2025 at prices inflated by these alleged misstatements.

What a derivative suit means

Because Rosen sues on Alphabet's behalf, any damages would be paid to the company, not to him. The complaint also asks for compensation to be returned and for new oversight of copyright and BIPA compliance. The allegations have not been tested in court, and none of the outlets reported a statement from Google. MBW notes that parts of the music section mirror an indie musicians' class action filed in March in the same court, which Google has asked to dismiss, and that a similar derivative suit was filed against Apple's leadership in August.