A group of Illinois-based journalists, podcasters, voice actors, and audiobook narrators has taken nine of the world’s most powerful technology companies to court, alleging their voices were scooped up and fed into AI systems without permission. The lawsuits, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois between May 13 and 19, 2026, name Apple, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Samsung, Alphabet, Adobe, and ElevenLabs as defendants.
What the lawsuits actually claim
The legal complaints rest primarily on Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act, commonly called BIPA. Before a company can collect a biometric identifier, including a voiceprint, it has to tell you, get your sign-off, and follow strict rules about how long it keeps the data.
The plaintiffs argue that none of the named companies did any of that. Their recorded voices, produced professionally for podcasts, audiobooks, and journalism, were allegedly harvested and used to train AI voice models without disclosure, without consent forms, and without the retention limits BIPA requires.
The suits also invoke state right-of-publicity laws and consumer fraud statutes. Statutory damages under BIPA can reach $1,000 per violation for negligent breaches and $5,000 per violation for intentional ones, calculated per victim and per subsection of the law.
Who’s fighting whom
The plaintiffs are represented by Loevy & Loevy, a Chicago-based firm that secured a $75 million BIPA settlement in 2024. On the other side, Gibson Dunn and Morgan Lewis are among the major law firms representing the tech companies.
As of late August 2026, the defendants have filed motions to dismiss, arguing the plaintiffs have not presented concrete evidence of actual harm. The plaintiffs counter that the systematic harvesting of voice data is itself the harm BIPA was designed to prevent, regardless of whether a cloned voice showed up in a commercial product that the original speaker could identify.