Google has been sued in a class-action lawsuit that alleged that the tech giant scraped data from millions of users without their consent using its artificial intelligence (AI) tools.

The lawsuit said Google also violated copyright laws in order to train and develop its AI products, reports CNN.

The class-action suit was filed on Tuesday against Google, its parent company Alphabet, and AI subsidiary DeepMind in a federal court in California and was brought by Clarkson Law Firm.

The firm previously filed a similar suit against ChatGPT-maker OpenAI last month. (OpenAI did not previously respond to a request for comment on the suit.)

According to the lawsuit, Google “has been secretly stealing everything ever created and shared on the Internet by hundreds of millions of Americans”.

The complaint also alleged that Google took “virtually the entirety of our digital footprint”, including “creative and copy-written works” to build its AI products.

Google did not immediately comment on the lawsuit.

Last week, Google updated its privacy policy in which it stated that it can use publicly available data to help train its AI models.

The tech giant changed the wording of its policy over the weekend and switched “AI models” for “language models”.

With the new policy, Google is informing people that anything they publicly post online can be used to train Bard, future versions and other generative AI products it develops.

Critics have expressed concerns about companies’ use of publicly available information to train large language models for generative AI use.

Last month, the Sam Altman-run OpenAI was sued in a class-action lawsuit in the US for allegedly stealing data from the public to train its AI chatbot ChatGPT.

(The story has been published via a syndicated feed.)