Writers Sue AI Startup Antropphic for Copyright Infringement. The case was filed in California federal court on a complaint that the company used their books and hundreds of thousands of literary works to train the Claude chatbot.
KEY FACTS
- The complaint was filed by three people—writers Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson—who allege that Anthropic used pirated versions of their and other works to train Claude.
- An Anthropic spokesman said the company was aware of the lawsuit but declined to comment further. The authors’ lawyer also refused to comment to Reuters.
- In their complaint, the authors claim that Anthropic has “built a multi-billion dollar business by stealing hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books.
ACCENT
The lawsuit filed Monday is the second against Anthropic. In October of last year, a complaint by Universal Music accused the startup of committing systemic violations by using copyrighted song lyrics.
TANGENT
This isn’t the first time a tech company has come under fire from copyright laws over the way it trains its AI models. In March this year, Google was fined a whopping €250m for breaches of EU intellectual property rules after media outlets such as France Presse complained that the tech giant had been training its Gemini chatbot on media posts and news agencies without the companies being notified.
Visual artists are also suing tech companies that train their AI models on their works.
