AI company Anthropic has been sued for allegedly using copyrighted material to train its AI model Claude. Three authors filed the complaint.

Anthropic, the AI ​​company behind the Claude model, has been sued in the US for copyright infringement by three authors. According to Reuters, they are writers and journalists Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson. The authors claim that Anthropic misused their books and those of hundreds of thousands of others to train its AI chatbot Claude.

Copyright infringement

Writers and journalists Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson filed a complaint against Anthropic on Monday. The authors said in their complaint that Anthropic “built a billion-dollar business by stealing hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books.” They further alleged that Anthropic used pirated copies of their and others’ work to teach Claude how to respond to human cues.

This is not the first time Anthropic has faced charges. A similar scenario occurred last year, but music publishers claimed that the AI ​​company was abusing their lyrics as training data.

AI models are trained on large data sets obtained from sources such as the internet. This information is available to everyone, but that doesn’t mean you can just use it. If the creators of the content are not asked for permission or compensated, it is considered infringement of copyrighted material. Not only Anthropic, but also OpenAI and Microsoft have already been guilty of this.