Samsung Electronics Sued in Class-Action Over Alleged Unauthorized AI Voice Data Use

Samsung Electronics has been sued in a class-action lawsuit filed by prominent American broadcasters. The lawsuit alleges that the company utilized voice data of individuals without consent during the development of AI voice models for Galaxy devices. The complaint was filed on January 13 (local time) in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois.

The plaintiffs are seven broadcast journalists, podcasters, and audiobook narrators residing in Illinois, who have filed a class-action lawsuit against Samsung Electronics and its U.S. subsidiary, Samsung Electronics America. The list of plaintiffs includes Johannes Rauer, a podcaster who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2024; Alison Flowers, an investigative journalist who was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2021; and Carol Marin, a broadcast journalist with 50 years of experience. Marin also received the Lincoln Award, Illinois' highest civilian honor, last year.

The plaintiffs are challenging the training methods used for voice AI products such as Bixby, Galaxy AI Live Translate, and Samsung's TTS engine. Their legal basis is the Illinois Biometric Information Protection Act (BIPA), which classifies voiceprints — the unique characteristics extracted from a voice — as biometric data, mandating prior notice and written consent for collection.

The plaintiffs claim that Samsung continued the development practices of Innoetics, a Greek speech synthesis company it acquired in 2017, even after the acquisition. Prior to its acquisition, Innoetics had published research on using audiobook recordings, publicly available online, as data for speech synthesis training without consent.

The plaintiffs are seeking statutory damages of up to $5,000 per person per violation from Samsung Electronics. They also requested the deletion or retraining of the learning models, disclosure of the training data sources, establishment of a procedure for requesting the deletion of biometric data, and the return of profits Samsung Electronics has gained. The plaintiffs estimate the number of victims in this case to be in the hundreds of thousands.

There are precedents for violations of the same law, with Facebook paying $650 million in a settlement in June 2020, Google paying $100 million in 2022, and TikTok paying $92 million in 2022.