An Alphabet shareholder named Phil Rosen has sued the company's chief executive Sundar Pichai, co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and ten other directors and executives, thirteen defendants in all. The 79-page complaint was filed on 30 October 2026 in federal court in Chicago, in the Northern District of Illinois. It is a derivative suit, brought on the company's behalf, so any damages would be paid to Alphabet rather than to Rosen.
The core allegation is that the defendants adopted an unlawful strategy of building Google's AI on copyrighted works and people's voices. For music, the complaint names Lyria, Lyria 2, Lyria 3, Mulan and MusicLM as models built on copies of recordings, compositions and lyrics. It says MusicLM, introduced in January 2023, was trained on 5 million audio clips totalling 280,000 hours, with no recordings, rights holders or licences identified. Google is accused of extracting the audio, converting it to machine-readable form, cutting it into clips and stripping the copyright information. A separate claim under Illinois' biometric privacy law covers Gemini Live and other voice products, said to rest on hundreds of thousands of hours of speech recorded without consent; that claim may explain the choice of Illinois.
“This tidal wave of litigation filed against AI developers like Alphabet served as blazing red flags alerting Defendants of the need to prevent Alphabet from committing and continuing to commit the same unlawful conduct”
Rosen's complaint (Rosen v. Pichai), in the complaint · musicbusinessworldwide.com ↗
Beyond Pichai, Page and Brin, the defendants include chair John L. Hennessy, six more directors, finance chief Anat Ashkenazi, president Ruth Porat and chief legal officer Kent Walker. A tracker of AI copyright cases also lists John Doerr. The complaint says Pichai alone received more than $30 million in pay between 2023 and 2025. It asks for damages paid to Alphabet, the return of compensation and governance changes, including oversight of copyright and biometric-privacy risk, but names no damages figure.
Rosen's argument is that the strategy was designed to avoid licensing costs and to pay damages later if sued, an approach of asking forgiveness rather than approval, using a pirated dataset. He says the defendants knew of the violations and that the board hid them from shareholders. The complaint points to Alphabet's repurchase of 1.147 billion shares between April 2023 and November 2025, worth $169.6 billion, at prices it says were inflated by undisclosed infringement. It also accuses the board of misleading investors in proxy statements: wording on responsible AI from the 2024 proxy was dropped from the 2025 and 2026 ones, while the 2025 proxy praised an auditable lineage system for AI assets.
Much of the music material draws on a proposed class action by independent musicians filed in the same court in March 2026, which Google has asked to have thrown out. There, Google argues that YouTube's terms give a licence extending to affiliates such as Google itself. The complaint also cites a January 2024 Billboard report that Google trained a music model on major-label recordings and then sought permission only from the largest players, and notes that four researchers named as core Lyria contributors later left to launch Udio. Walker's June 2026 policy paper, which argued that training on public web data is transformative fair use, is cited as well. The complaint treats this earlier litigation, along with the Billboard report, as notice that the same conduct could expose Alphabet, and says the proxy statements still gave shareholders a misleading picture of that exposure.
About Alphabet
Alphabet is an American technology holding company based in Mountain View, California. It was created on 2 October 2015 in a restructuring that made Google its main subsidiary. In December 2019 founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin stepped back from executive posts and Sundar Pichai, already Google's chief executive, took the Alphabet role as well; Page and Brin remained board members and controlling shareholders.
This is not the first time Alphabet's AI music work has come under scrutiny. Google launched Lyria 3, its DeepMind music model, in the Gemini app in beta on 18 February 2026, letting anyone make 30-second tracks from text or photos, with a SynthID watermark on every track.
As warning signs the board ignored, the suit lists the major labels' cases against Suno and Udio and two suits by Universal, Concord and ABKCO against Anthropic. It ties Anthropic's $1.5 billion payment in September 2025, which settled a separate authors' class action, to the publishers' first suit. Rosen filed a similar derivative suit against Apple's executives and board in August 2026. No hearing date or response from Alphabet has been reported.