Nvidia, a company that has had a meteoric rise with chips that power artificial intelligence, has been sued by three US authors who said it used their copyrighted books without permission to train its NeMo AI platform.

Authors Brian Keene, Abdi Nazemian and Stewart O’Nan said their works were part of a dataset of about 196,640 books that helped train NeMo to simulate ordinary written language before being taken down in October. They are asking for unspecified damages for people in the US whose copyrighted works helped train NeMo’s large language models in the past three years. The lawsuit was filed at a San Francisco federal court. Among the works covered by the lawsuit are 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. The lawsuit joins a growing body of litigation by writers as well as The New York Times, over generative AI.

Nvidia is on the cusp of becoming the world’s second-most-valuable company, displacing Apple. Investors are putting their money on semiconductor makers whose chips power popular artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT. An AI-induced rally in Nvidia shares has taken the company’s valuation from $1 trillion to more than $2 trillion in just nine months, overtaking Amazon.com, Google-parent Alphabet and Saudi Aramco on the way.