Anthropic, the developer of the chatbot Claude, is facing a new copyright infringement lawsuit. The authors claim that the company used their books and hundreds of thousands of books by other authors without permission to train artificial intelligence.
Image source: anthropic.com
According to Reuters, the plaintiffs include writers Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson. They claim that Anthropic pirated versions of their works, demanding monetary compensation and a blanket ban on misuse of the works.
The lawsuit was part of a broader stream of litigation brought by copyright holders, including artists, news outlets and record labels. They are demanding clarification on how and on what basis tech companies are freely using their materials to train their generative AI systems.
An Anthropic spokesman said Tuesday that the company is aware of the lawsuit and is evaluating the complaint, but declined to comment further, citing litigation. The authors’ lawyer also declined to comment.
It should be noted that this is the second lawsuit against Anthropic. Last year, music publishers filed a lawsuit accusing the company of misusing copyrighted song lyrics to teach Claude. Previously, several groups of authors filed lawsuits against companies such as OpenAI and Meta✴, accusing them of similar illegal use of works to train their language models.