Nine Tech Giants Face Illinois Biometric Suits Over AI Voice Training

Nine major technology companies are defending themselves against class action lawsuits in Chicago federal court that allege they illegally harvested thousands of hours of human voice recordings to train their artificial intelligence systems.

The defendants—Apple, Amazon, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, Nvidia, Samsung, Alphabet, Adobe, and ElevenLabs—each face potential damages in the hundreds of millions of dollars under Illinois' Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), according to plaintiffs' attorney Ross Kimbarovsky of Loevy & Loevy.

The plaintiffs include journalists, podcasters, and audiobook narrators, among them Chicago journalist Carol Marin and Pulitzer Prize winners Yohance Lacour and Alison Flowers. They claim the companies violated BIPA by collecting biometric voice data without informing them, obtaining consent, or disclosing how long the data would be retained.

Why it matters

These cases represent a significant test of whether state biometric privacy laws can regulate how AI companies acquire training data. Unlike the wave of copyright lawsuits against AI developers, these suits invoke consumer protection statutes with per-person, per-violation penalties that could scale to massive damages. The outcome could establish whether voice recordings constitute protected biometric identifiers and set precedent for how companies must handle audio data used in machine learning.

BIPA's statutory penalties

Illinois' biometric privacy law imposes $1,000 penalties for negligent violations and $5,000 for intentional or reckless ones, applied per victim and for each violated subsection. While Illinois narrowed these penalties in 2024 following a surge of litigation, the potential exposure remains substantial given the number of alleged victims and multiple statutory provisions at issue.

The law requires companies collecting biometric data to inform subjects, obtain consent, detail collection scope and duration, develop written retention and destruction policies, and refrain from selling the data.

The defense strategy

The technology companies have assembled legal teams from ten major law firms, including Gibson Dunn for Apple, Quinn Emanuel for Alphabet, Sidley Austin for Adobe, and Latham & Watkins for ElevenLabs and Meta. The defense includes Gary Feinerman, a former Chicago federal judge appointed by President Obama, and Andrew Schapiro, who previously defended Google in the Chrome Incognito data collection case.

In recent motions to dismiss, several defendants argue the claims are speculative and that BIPA does not apply because the alleged data misuse did not occur in Illinois. Apple's lawyers stated that plaintiffs "allege only that their recordings are available on the internet" without facts showing Apple used those specific recordings.

A Meta spokesperson said the company provides information about data use and called the claims "incorrect." Alphabet declined to comment.

Precedent and pending appeals

Loevy & Loevy has secured major BIPA settlements before, including $75 million from freight rail company BNSF in 2024 and $47.5 million from Motorola Solutions in 2025. The firm also represents plaintiffs in BIPA litigation against facial recognition company Clearview AI.

Meanwhile, in separate AI litigation, several plaintiffs' firms including Edelson have appealed a judge's decision denying them legal fees from Anthropic's $1.5 billion copyright settlement. U.S. District Judge William Alsup called the non-appointed firms "interlopers" and awarded fees only to court-appointed lead counsel Susman Godfrey and Lieff Cabraser, who ultimately received about $101 million.

The nine BIPA cases are currently assigned to seven different judges in Chicago federal court, though Apple has requested consolidation before a single judge.

These details were first reported by Reuters.