Three authors have filed a class-action lawsuit against artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic, with accusations of misusing copyrighted material to train AI-powered chatbot, Claude.
The lawsuit, filed on August 19th, 2024, in the California federal court, alleges that Anthropic included pirated copies of books by the plaintiffs – Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson – and potentially hundreds of thousands of other copyrighted works in their training data for Claude.
This lawsuit adds to the list of copyright infringement issues against tech companies developing large language models (LLMs).
Similar lawsuits have been filed against OpenAI and Meta Platforms, accusing them of using copyrighted content from authors, visual artists, and news outlets to train their respective chatbots.
For Anthropic, this is the second copyright infringement lawsuit it is facing. Last year, music publishers accused the company of using copyrighted song lyrics without permission to train Claude.
The lawsuit against Anthropic claims the company “built a multi-billion dollar business on the backs of stolen intellectual property,” referring to the alleged inclusion of pirated books in Claude’s training data.
Anthropic, which has financial backing from tech giants like Amazon, Google, and former cryptocurrency billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, has yet to respond to the lawsuit.
The authors are seeking unspecified monetary damages and a permanent injunction to prevent Anthropic from further misusing their copyrighted works.
