Despite Combining With xAI, X Still Faces Music Publishers Suit

xAI has acquired X (formerly Twitter) in an all-stock transaction. Despite the multibillion-dollar deal, however, the social platform is still facing an infringement suit from almost 20 music publishers.

Elon Musk unveiled the purchase in a post on the relevant social service. “The combination values xAI at $80 billion and X at $33 billion ($45B less $12B debt),” he noted, emphasizing as well X’s “more than 600M active users” and the combined entity’s “immense potential.”

“Today,” Musk continued, “we officially take the step to combine the data, models, compute, distribution and talent. This combination will unlock immense potential by blending xAI’s advanced AI capability and expertise with X’s massive reach.”

Of course, the precise effects of that “blending” remain to be seen; other coverage of the purchase doesn’t look to have disclosed many details besides those included in Musk’s post.

But at the top level, one needn’t be an AI expert to grasp the arrangement’s inherent training advantages – especially given that X’s constant stream of content and interactions flows in a multitude of languages.

(Turning for a moment to X’s privacy settings section, unless users have opted out, their “public data” might be used “to train and fine-tune Grok and other AI models developed by xAI.”)

Keeping the focus on what we do know, new ownership structure or not, X hasn’t completely shaken the copyright infringement suit filed against it by 17 National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) members.

We’ve covered the legal battle, centering on X’s alleged failure to adequately address users’ repeat infringement, since it initiated in June 2023.

Despite garnering less media attention amid high-stakes copyright suits against gen AI giants, not to mention music publishers’ ongoing Spotify showdown, the case has been chugging along all the while.

As things stand – and with a trial not expected until 2026 at the earliest – the publishers and X are locking horns in an involved discovery sub-dispute. Last week, the presiding judge signed off on the parties’ joint request to expand a related protective order, which now extends to additional “commercially sensitive” information.

Meanwhile, the music publishers submitted an amended action towards 2025’s beginning. X promptly refuted this retooled suit, though neither the updated complaint nor the appropriate response looks to have broken much new ground.

Perhaps the most interesting takeaway here is the publishers’ decision to reiterate already-dismissed (in March 2024) direct and vicarious copyright claims.

“Plaintiffs have left those claims in the Amended Complaint to preserve all rights as to those claims,” the publishers explained.