A group of authors is suing the AI startup Anthropic, accusing it of “large-scale theft” for using pirated copies of copyrighted books to train its popular chatbot, Claude.
While similar lawsuits have been filed against OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, for over a year, this is the first lawsuit from writers specifically targeting Anthropic and its Claude chatbot.
The smaller San Francisco-based company, founded by former OpenAI leaders, has positioned itself as a more responsible and safety-focused developer of generative AI models capable of composing emails, summarizing documents, and interacting naturally with users.
However, the lawsuit filed Monday in federal court in San Francisco claims that Anthropic’s actions have “undermined its lofty goals” by using repositories of pirated texts to develop its AI product.
The lawsuit asserts, “It is no exaggeration to claim that Anthropic’s model profits by exploiting the human creativity and expression embedded in each of these works.”
Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday. The suit was filed by three writers—Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson—who seek to represent a class of authors of both fiction and nonfiction with similar claims.
Although this is the first lawsuit against Anthropic from book authors, the company is also contending with a lawsuit from major music publishers, who allege that Claude reproduces the lyrics of copyrighted songs.
This case adds to a growing number of lawsuits against developers of AI large language models in San Francisco and New York.
OpenAI and its business partner Microsoft are already facing copyright infringement lawsuits from prominent figures like John Grisham, Jodi Picoult, and “Game of Thrones” author George R. R. Martin, as well as additional lawsuits from media outlets such as The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, etc.
The common thread in all these cases is the allegation that tech companies used vast amounts of human-written content to train AI chatbots to generate text that mimics human writing, without obtaining permission or compensating the original authors.
These legal challenges are not limited to writers but also include visual artists, music labels, and other creators who argue that the profits from generative AI are based on the unauthorized use of their work.
Anthropic and other tech companies contend that training AI models falls under the “fair use” doctrine of U.S. law, which permits limited use of copyrighted materials for purposes like teaching, research, or creating transformative works.
However, the lawsuit against Anthropic claims that the company used a dataset called The Pile, which included a collection of pirated books. The lawsuit also challenges the notion that AI systems learn in the same way humans do.
The lawsuit argues, “Humans who learn from books purchase legal copies or borrow them from libraries that acquire them, thereby providing some level of compensation to authors and creators.”
Other Stories You May Like