A group of writers is suing artificial intelligence Startup Antropic claims it committed “grand theft” when training its popular chatbot, Claude, to pirate copies of copyrighted books.
meanwhile Similar lawsuits Criticism of ChatGPT’s rival developer, OpenAI, has been ongoing for over a year, but this is the first time that writers have targeted Anthropic and its Claude chatbot.
The small San Francisco-based company, founded by former OpenAI leaders, markets itself as a more responsible, safety-focused developer of generative AI models that can compose emails, summarize documents, and interact with people in natural ways.
But the lawsuit, filed Monday in federal court in San Francisco, argues that Anthropic’s use of a repository of pirated documents to build its AI product “makes a mockery of the company’s lofty goals.”
“It is no exaggeration to say that Anthropic’s business model seeks to profit from the human expression and ingenuity behind each work of art,” the lawsuit states.
Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday.
The lawsuit was filed by three authors — Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson — who seek to represent similarly situated fiction and non-fiction authors.
While this is the first lawsuit against Anthropic by a book author, the company is also fighting a lawsuit brought by a major music publisher that claims Claude has copied lyrics from copyrighted songs.
The authors’ lawsuit joins a growing number of lawsuits filed in San Francisco and New York against developers of AI large-scale language models.
OpenAI and its business partner Microsoft are already battling a series of copyright infringement lawsuits led by big names such as John Grisham, Jodi Picoult and “Game of Thrones” novelist George R.R. Martin. The New York TimesChicago Tribune Mother Jones.
A common thread among these lawsuits is the allegation that tech companies have taken large amounts of human text and trained AI chatbots to write human-like sentences without permission or compensation from the original authors. Visual artist, Music Label And other creators who argue that generative AI’s profits were built on misappropriation.
Antropic and other technology companies say they train their AI models “Fair Use” Principle U.S. law permits limited uses of copyrighted material, such as for teaching, research, or transforming the work into something else.
But the lawsuit against Anthropic accuses the company of using a dataset it calls “The Pile,” which contains a mountain of pirated books, and also disputes the idea that its AI systems learn in the same way that humans do.
“People who learn from books pay at least some compensation to authors and creators by purchasing legal copies or borrowing them from libraries that buy books,” the lawsuit states.
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The Associated Press and OpenAI License and Technology Agreements This gives OpenAI access to parts of the AP’s text archive.
