Award-winning authors are taking on OpenAI and Microsoft in a copyright lawsuit.

(Reuters) – A group of 11 science fiction authors have joined a lawsuit filed in Manhattan federal court that accuses OpenAI and Microsoft of misusing books written by the authors to teach the models behind OpenAI’s popular chatbot ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence-based software.

Screenwriters including Pulitzer Prize winners Taylor Branch, Stacy Schiff and Kai Bird — who co-wrote J. Robert Oppenheimer’s biography “American Prometheus,” which was adapted into the hit movie “Oppenheimer” this year — told a court Tuesday that the companies violated their copyright by using their work on training OpenAI’s large GPT language models.

Representatives for OpenAI and Microsoft did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Wednesday.

“The defendants are raking in billions from the unauthorized use of non-fiction books, and the authors of these books deserve fair compensation and treatment,” Rohit Nath, the authors’ lawyer, said on Wednesday.

Author and Hollywood Reporter editor Julian Sancton first filed the proposed class action lawsuit last month. The case is one of several that groups of copyright owners, including authors John Grisham, George R.R. Martin and Jonathan Franzen, have sued OpenAI and other tech companies for allegedly misusing their work in AI education.

The companies have denied the allegations.

Sancton’s was the first copyright case against OpenAI to also name Microsoft as a defendant. The technology giant has invested billions of dollars in artificial intelligence startups and integrated OpenAI’s systems into its products.

An amended complaint filed Monday said OpenAI “scraped” the creators’ works and other copyrighted material from the Internet without permission to teach its GPT models to respond to human text prompts.

The lawsuit also said that Microsoft has been “deeply involved” in the training and development of the models and is also responsible for copyright infringement.

The authors are asking the court for an unspecified amount of monetary damages and an order for the companies to stop infringing their copyrights.