Authors Claim AI Company Anthropic Used Pirated Data for Model Training

Three authors have filed a class-action suit against artificial intelligence company Anthropic for copyright infringement, claiming the company used pirated versions of their works to train its Claude family of large language models (LLMs).

Lawsuit Against Anthropic

Plaintiffs Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson are journalists and authors of popular fiction and nonfiction. They allege that Anthropic knowingly used data sets that “were comprised of a trove of copyrighted content sourced from pirate websites.”

Copyright Infringement Allegations

Anthropic could have obtained licenses to use the material it took, the suit alleges, but instead “made the deliberate decision to cut corners and rely on stolen materials to train their models.”

Quote (CITE_W_A): “Throughout its existence, Anthropic has cloaked itself in the rhetoric of ‘AI safety’ and ‘responsibility.’ Its actions, however, have made a mockery of its lofty goals,” the suit states.

Context and Commentary

The suit, filed in the Northern California District Court, also attempts to frame its allegations in a larger context. Goldman Sachs estimates that generative AI could replace 300 million full-time jobs in the near future. Already, writers report losing income from copywriting, journalism, and online content writing.

Quote (CITE_NA): “In the last two years, a thriving licensing market for copyrighted training data has developed. A number of AI companies, including OpenAI, Google, and Meta, have paid hundreds of millions of dollars to obtain licenses to reproduce copyrighted material for LLM training.”

The plaintiffs ask the court to rule on whether Anthropic infringed on authors’ copyrights, whether the company’s actions constitute fair use, whether the members of the class action were harmed and are entitled to damages and whether Anthropic acted willfully in its alleged infringement.