Anthropic Sued For Copyright Infringement By Authors

AI startup Anthropic is facing its second piece of bad news this month, after it was hit with a class-action lawsuit in California.

Reuters reported that three three authors on Monday alleged Anthropic misused their books and hundreds of thousands of others, in order to train its AI-powered chatbot Claude.

This is the second piece of bad news for the AI firm, after the British competition regulator, the CMA, announced it would investigate Amazon.com’s partnership with Anthropic.

Author’s allegations

The UK regulator has “real concerns” of AI Foundation Models (FMs) being controlled by a small number of tech firms.

The CMA had recently launched a similar competition probe on Alphabet’s collaboration with Anthropic.

Now Reuters has reported that Anthropic has been hit with a class-action lawsuit by three authors in California federal court.

The complaint by writers and journalists Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson, allege that Anthropic used pirated versions of their works and others to teach Claude to respond to human prompts.

The authors also allege in their complaint that Anthropic has “built a multibillion-dollar business by stealing hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books.”

According to the complaint, the authors’ works were included in a dataset of pirated books that Anthropic used to train Claude.

The lawsuit requested an unspecified amount of monetary damages and an order permanently blocking Anthropic from misusing the authors’ work.

Anthropic response

A spokesperson for Anthropic on Tuesday told Reuters that the company was aware of the lawsuit and assessing the complaint, but declined to comment further, citing pending litigation.

An attorney for the authors declined to comment, Reuters reported.

This latest case is the second such lawsuit against Anthropic, after a lawsuit was filed against the AI firm in 2023 by music publishers, who also alleged misuse of copyrighted song lyrics to train Claude.

AI copyright lawsuits

AI firms such as Anthropic, OpenAI and others have faced multiple lawsuits over the past year, alleging copyright infringement.

The lawsuits, filed by various newspapers, publishers, artists, record labels and copyright holders have alleged the firms used their material to train their generative artificial intelligence systems.

Some AI firms have begun reaching licensing deals with content providers such as News Corp as a way to mitigate these legal claims.