Authors Sue Claude AI Chatbot Maker Anthropic For Copyright Infringement

A group of authors is suing artificial intelligence (AI) startup Anthropic, alleging it committed “large-scale theft” in training its popular chatbot Claude on pirated copies of copyrighted books, Matt O’Brien reported for the Associated Press (AP).

While similar lawsuits have piled up for more than a year against competitor OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, this is the first from writers targeting Anthropic and its Claude chatbot. I Image: Claude

While similar lawsuits have piled up for more than a year against competitor OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, this is the first from writers targeting Anthropic and its Claude chatbot.

The smaller San Francisco-based company—founded by ex-OpenAI leaders—has marketed itself as the more responsible and safety-focused developer of generative AI models that can compose emails, summarize documents, and interact with people naturally.

The lawsuit against Anthropic accuses it of using a dataset called The Pile, which included a trove of pirated books.

It also disputes the idea that AI systems are learning the way humans do.

The lawsuit, filed Monday in a federal court in San Francisco, alleges that Anthropic’s actions “have made a mockery of its lofty goals” by tapping into repositories of pirated writings to build its AI product.

“It is no exaggeration to say that Anthropic’s model seeks to profit from strip-mining the human expression and ingenuity behind each one of those works,” the lawsuit states.

The lawsuit was brought by a trio of writers—Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson—who are seeking to represent a class of similarly situated authors of fiction and nonfiction.