Chicago, Illinois. July 31, 2026. Bottini & Bottini, Inc. filed a stockholder derivative lawsuit on behalf of NVIDIA Corporation in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, alleging that certain of the Company's officers and directors adopted and implemented an unlawful business strategy that relied on pirated books, scraped YouTube videos, and non-consensual voice recordings to train NVIDIA's artificial intelligence models.
The derivative action, Berliner v. Huang, Case No. 1:26-cv-09153 (N.D. Ill.), was brought on behalf of the Company's client, shareholder Jessica Berliner, against CEO Jensen Huang, Lead Director Stephen Neal, and eleven other directors and executive officers, including CFO Colette Kress and General Counsel Timothy Teter.
The complaint alleges that NVIDIA trained its large language models, including the NeMo Megatron family, on the "Books3" dataset and other pirated materials sourced from shadow libraries such as Anna's Archive, LibGen, and Sci-Hub. It further alleges that NVIDIA built its Cosmos video-generation model by downloading and circumventing technological protections on millions of YouTube videos, and that the Company's commercial voice-synthesis products — including Magpie TTS and FUGATTO — were trained on hundreds of thousands of hours of human speech recordings extracted without the speakers' consent, in violation of the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act.
According to the complaint, Defendants were aware of the legal risk posed by this approach, pointing to a wave of AI copyright litigation against companies including Anthropic, Microsoft, Apple, and Salesforce, as well as three separate class actions already filed directly against NVIDIA over the same conduct: Nazemian v. NVIDIA Corp. (N.D. Cal.), Ted Entertainment, Inc. v. NVIDIA Corp. (N.D. Cal.), and Rogers v. NVIDIA Corp. (N.D. Ill.). The derivative complaint asserts claims for breach of fiduciary duty against the Defendants for causing the Company to pursue this strategy despite those red flags, exposing NVIDIA to potentially significant damages, legal costs, and reputational harm.
Bottini & Bottini attorneys Francis A. Bottini, Jr. and David T. Wissbroecker represent the plaintiff in this action.