NVIDIA—Shareholders sued Nvidia board alleging AI models were trained on pirated books and biometric voice data without consent
A stockholder derivative lawsuit filed July 31, 2026 in the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois (Berliner v. Huang et al.) accused Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang, CFO Colette Kress, and the board of breaching fiduciary duty by knowingly training NeMo Megatron and other language models on pirated 'shadow library' datasets (Anna's Archive, LibGen, Sci-Hub, Z-Library, Books3/SlimPajama), including material Nvidia allegedly sourced directly from Anna's Archive in 2023 despite an internal warning about copyright issues. The complaint also alleges Nvidia's Magpie TTS, FUGATTO, PersonaPlex and other voice-synthesis models extracted biometric voiceprints from hundreds of thousands of hours of speech recordings without notice or consent, in violation of the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, and that proxy filings misrepresented data-sourcing compliance.
Scoring Impact
| Topic | Direction | Relevance | Contribution |
|---|---|---|---|
| Corporate Governance | -against | secondary | -0.50 |
| Intellectual Property Ethics | -against | primary | -1.00 |
| User Privacy | -against | secondary | -0.50 |
| Overall incident score = | -0.662 | ||
Score = avg(topic contributions) × significance (high ×1.5) × confidence (0.66)
Evidence (2 signals)
Bloomberg Law: Nvidia board sued by shareholders over AI data scraping practices
Bloomberg Law reported on the derivative suit against Nvidia's board, describing it as a governance case repackaging AI training-data litigation risk as a board oversight failure, naming Jensen Huang among the defendants.
Court docket: Berliner v. Huang stockholder derivative complaint filed against Nvidia board
The filed complaint in the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois details allegations that Nvidia trained models on pirated shadow-library datasets and unlicensed biometric voice data, and names CEO Jensen Huang, CFO Colette Kress, and other officers/directors as defendants.