Key Points:
- Three authors have filed a class-action lawsuit against AI company Anthropic, accusing it of using pirated books to train its chatbot, Claude.
- The lawsuit alleges Anthropic built a “multibillion-dollar business” by misusing copyrighted works without permission.
- This is the second lawsuit against Anthropic, following a case related to the misuse of copyrighted song lyrics.
- Similar lawsuits have been filed against OpenAI and Meta, highlighting the ongoing legal battles over AI training practices.
Anthropic, an artificial intelligence company, is facing a class-action lawsuit filed by three authors in a California federal court on Monday. The lawsuit accuses Anthropic of using pirated versions of their books and hundreds of thousands of other works to train its AI-powered chatbot, Claude. The plaintiffs in the case are authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, who allege that their copyrighted works were misused without permission.
The lawsuit claims that Anthropic leveraged these pirated materials to build a “multibillion-dollar business” by using the authors’ intellectual property to teach Claude how to respond to human prompts. This legal action adds to a growing list of high-profile cases where copyright holders, including visual artists, news outlets, and record labels, have filed complaints against tech companies for the material used to train generative AI systems.
This case is the second lawsuit against Anthropic, following a previous legal challenge brought by music publishers over the alleged misuse of copyrighted song lyrics to train the same AI model. Similar lawsuits have also been filed against other tech giants, including OpenAI and Meta Platforms, by groups of authors who claim their works were used without consent to train large-language models that power AI chatbots.
Anthropic, which has received substantial financial backing from major companies like Amazon and Google, and former cryptocurrency billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, acknowledged the lawsuit but declined to comment due to the ongoing litigation.
The authors are seeking unspecified monetary damages and a court order permanently preventing Anthropic from using their works in the future. The case highlights the increasing tension between copyright holders and AI developers as generative AI expands rapidly, raising questions about intellectual property rights in the digital age.
