A trio of authors are suing artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, claiming that it allegedly committed “large scale-theft” by training its popular chatbot Claude AI on pirated copies of copyrighted books.
Despite similar lawsuits being filed against AI competitors, including Nvidia and ChatGPT-creator OpenAI, this is the first of its kind to target Anthropic and Claude AI.
The San Francisco-based company, founded by ex-OpenAI leaders, has advertised itself as a comparatively safer and more responsible developer of AI models that performs its tasks in a more natural way.
However, this self-cultivated image was broken on Monday when the lawsuit filed by the respective authors at a federal court accused Anthropic of having “made a mockery of its lofty goals” by using repositories of pirated writings to build its own AI products, particularly its popular chatbot.
“It is no exaggeration to say that Anthropic’s model seeks to profit from strip-mining the human expression and ingenuity behind each one of those works,” the lawsuit alleged.
The lawsuit was brought by a trio of writers — Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson — who seek to represent a growing class of authors of fiction and nonfiction who are in similar situations.
Anthropic and other tech companies have continually argued that their manner of training their AI models fit into the “fair use” doctrine of American laws that allows for the limited use of copyrighted materials for purposes such as teaching, research or transformation.
However, the authors’ lawsuit specifically accuses Anthropic of using a dataset called The Pile that includes a trove of pirated books.
It also challenges the idea that AI models learn information the way humans do. “Humans who learn from books buy lawful copies of them, or borrow them from libraries that buy them, providing at least some measure of compensation to authors and creators,” the lawsuit claims.
Moreover, while this may be the first case against Anthropic specifically from book authors, the company is currently fighting a lawsuit by major music publishers who claim that Claude has regurgitated the lyrics of copyrighted songs.
The authors’ case against Anthropic joins an ever-growing number of lawsuits filed against AI developers across the world, particularly the United States. It serves as a much-needed reminder for the need of stricter regulations when it comes to the development of AI in order to maintain respect and dignity for other creations.
