For the second time, Anthropic, the company behind the AI chatbot Claude, faces legal action over alleged copyright infringement. On August 19, a class action lawsuit was filed in a California federal court by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson.
The lawsuit accuses the Amazon-backed startup of building a multibillion-dollar business by infringing on hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books, including those written by the plaintiffs.
“An essential component of Anthropic’s business model – and its flagship ‘Claude’ family of large language models (or ‘LLMs’) – is the large-scale theft of copyrighted works. Anthropic downloaded known pirated versions of Plaintiffs’ works, made copies of them, and fed these pirated copies into its models.” the lawsuit argues
“Copyright law prohibits what Anthropic has done here: downloading and copying hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books taken from pirated and illegal websites.” It further added
Anthropic’s flagrant disregard for intellectual property rights has far-reaching consequences, harming not only authors and publishers but also eroding the literary ecosystem’s integrity. By leveraging illicitly sourced works to train their AI model, Anthropic stands accused of profiting from stolen content, prompting urgent questions about the ethical and legal implications of their business conduct.
The rise of AI-generated content has sparked legal battles between developers of LLMs like Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini, and copyright holders such as news outlets, music companies, and publishers. At the heart of these disputes is a crucial question: do these tech companies’ use of vast copyrighted datasets to train their AI models constitute copyright infringement, or is it protected under fair use provisions?
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI employees, siblings Daniela Amodei and Dario Amodei. The company has secured funding from prominent investors including Amazon ($4 Bn), Google ($2.55 Bn), and Salesforce.
In June, Anthropic announced its latest breakthrough AI model, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, marking a significant milestone in its AI development journey.
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