Google, Amazon-backed Anthropic faces copyright lawsuit over AI model’s training – report

Artificial intelligence startup Anthropic is facing a class-action lawsuit in California federal court by three authors who alleged that the San Francisco-based company misused their books and hundreds of thousands of others to train its AI chatbot Claude, Reuters reported.

The complaint was filed on Monday by writers and journalists Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson, who alleged that “Anthropic has built a multibillion-dollar business by stealing hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books. Rather than obtaining permission and paying a fair price for the creations it exploits, Anthropic pirated them,” according to a court document accessed by the news agency.

The plaintiffs alleged that their works and of others were used to teach the company’s large language model, or LLM, Claude. “An essential component of Anthropic’s business model—and its flagship ‘Claude’ family of large language models (or ‘LLMs’) — is the largescale theft of copyrighted works,” the plaintiffs alleged.

The case against Anthropic — which is backed by Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) and Alphabet’s (NASDAQ:GOOGL) (NASDAQ:GOOG) Google — is the second against the company after music publishers brought a lawsuit last year alleging misuse of copyrighted song lyrics to train Claude, the report added.

The authors alleged that though Anthropic has been secretive about the sources of its training corpus for Claude,

They added that one of The Pile’s architects is an independent developer named Shawn Presser who created a dataset included in The Pile called “Books3” which is a trove of pirated books.

The Plaintiffs are seeking an unspecified amount of monetary damages and an order permanently restricting Anthropic from engaging in the alleged infringing conduct.

The lawsuit is among several legal actions that some companies, developing AI models, are facing over alleged misuse of copyrighted material.

Separate groups of authors have filed lawsuits against Microsoft (MSFT)-backed OpenAI, and Meta Platforms (META) over the alleged misuse of works to train the companies LLMs, which power their chatbots.

Currently, the U.K.’s antitrust agency is looking into Anthropic’s partnership with Google and Amazon.

Separately, OpenAI co-founder John Schulman is leaving the company to join Anthropic.