Authors Sue AI Company Anthropic Over Copyright Infringement

Anthropic accused of seeking to profit from 'strip-mining the human expression and ingenuity' behind authors' work

A group of authors is suing artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, alleging it committed "large-scale theft" in training its popular chatbot Claude on pirated copies of copyrighted books. While similar lawsuits have piled up for more than a year against competitor OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, this is the first from writers to target Anthropic and its Claude chatbot. The smaller San Francisco-based company -- founded by ex-OpenAI leaders -- has marketed itself as the more responsible and safety-focused developer of generative AI models that can compose emails, summarize documents and interact with people in a natural way. But the lawsuit filed Monday in a federal court in San Francisco alleges that Anthropic's actions "have made a mockery of its lofty goals" by tapping into repositories of pirated writings to build its AI product. "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 says. Anthropic didn't immediately respond to a request for comment Monday. The lawsuit was brought by a trio of writers -- Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson -- who are seeking to represent a class of similarly situated authors of fiction and nonfiction. While it's the first case against Anthropic from book authors, the company is also fighting a lawsuit by major music publishers alleging that Claude regurgitates the lyrics of copyrighted songs. The authors' case joins a growing number of lawsuits filed against developers of AI large language models in San Francisco and New York. OpenAI and its business partner Microsoft are already battling a group of copyright infringement cases led by household names like John Grisham, Jodi Picoult and "Game of Thrones" novelist George R. R. Martin; and another set of lawsuits from media outlets such as The New York Times, Chicago Tribune and Mother Jones. What links all the cases is the claim that tech companies ingested huge troves of human writings to train AI chatbots to produce human-like passages of text, without getting permission or compensating the people who wrote the original works. The legal challenges are coming not just from writers but visual artists, music labels and other creators who allege that generative AI profits have been built on misappropriation. Anthropic and other tech companies have argued that training of AI models fits into the "fair use" doctrine of U.S. laws that allows for limited uses of copyrighted materials such as for teaching, research or transforming the copyrighted work into something different. But the lawsuit against Anthropic accuses it of using a dataset called The Pile that included a trove of pirated books. It also disputes the idea that AI systems are learning 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 says.

AI chatbot creator Anthropic is sued on copyright allegations

A group of authors is suing artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, alleging it committed "large-scale theft" in training its popular chatbot Claude on pirated copies of copyrighted books. While similar lawsuits have piled up for more than a year against competitor OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, this is the first from writers to target Anthropic and its Claude chatbot. The smaller San Francisco-based company -- founded by ex-OpenAI leaders -- has marketed itself as the more responsible and safety-focused developer of generative AI models that can compose emails, summarize documents and interact with people in a natural way. But the lawsuit filed Monday in a federal court in San Francisco alleges that Anthropic's actions "have made a mockery of its lofty goals" by tapping into repositories of pirated writings to build its AI product. "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 says. Anthropic didn't immediately respond to a request for comment Monday. The lawsuit was brought by a trio of writers -- Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson -- who are seeking to represent a class of similarly situated authors of fiction and nonfiction. While it's the first case against Anthropic from book authors, the company is also fighting a lawsuit by major music publishers alleging that Claude regurgitates the lyrics of copyrighted songs. The authors' case joins a growing number of lawsuits filed against developers of AI large language models in San Francisco and New York. OpenAI and its business partner Microsoft are already battling a group of copyright infringement cases led by household names like John Grisham, Jodi Picoult and "Game of Thrones" novelist George R. R. Martin; and another set of lawsuits from media outlets such as The New York Times, Chicago Tribune and Mother Jones. What links all the cases is the claim that tech companies ingested huge troves of human writings to train AI chatbots to produce human-like passages of text, without getting permission or compensating the people who wrote the original works. The legal challenges are coming not just from writers but visual artists, music labels and other creators who allege that generative AI profits have been built on misappropriation. Anthropic and other tech companies have argued that training of AI models fits into the "fair use" doctrine of U.S. laws that allows for limited uses of copyrighted materials such as for teaching, research or transforming the copyrighted work into something different. But the lawsuit against Anthropic accuses it of using a dataset called The Pile that included a trove of pirated books. It also disputes the idea that AI systems are learning 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 says. -- -- -- The Associated Press and OpenAI have a licensing and technology agreement that allows OpenAI access to part of AP's text archives.

Authors sue Claude AI chatbot creator Anthropic for copyright infringement

A group of authors is suing artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, alleging it committed "large-scale theft" in training its popular chatbot Claude on pirated copies of copyrighted books A group of authors is suing artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, alleging it committed "large-scale theft" in training its popular chatbot Claude on pirated copies of copyrighted books. While similar lawsuits have piled up for more than a year against competitor OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, this is the first from writers to target Anthropic and its Claude chatbot. The smaller San Francisco-based company -- founded by ex-OpenAI leaders -- has marketed itself as the more responsible and safety-focused developer of generative AI models that can compose emails, summarize documents and interact with people in a natural way. But the lawsuit filed Monday in a federal court in San Francisco alleges that Anthropic's actions "have made a mockery of its lofty goals" by tapping into repositories of pirated writings to build its AI product. "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 says. Anthropic didn't immediately respond to a request for comment Monday. The lawsuit was brought by a trio of writers -- Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson -- who are seeking to represent a class of similarly situated authors of fiction and nonfiction. While it's the first case against Anthropic from book authors, the company is also fighting a lawsuit by major music publishers alleging that Claude regurgitates the lyrics of copyrighted songs. The authors' case joins a growing number of lawsuits filed against developers of AI large language models in San Francisco and New York. OpenAI and its business partner Microsoft are already battling a group of copyright infringement cases led by household names like John Grisham, Jodi Picoult and "Game of Thrones" novelist George R. R. Martin; and another set of lawsuits from media outlets such as The New York Times, Chicago Tribune and Mother Jones. What links all the cases is the claim that tech companies ingested huge troves of human writings to train AI chatbots to produce human-like passages of text, without getting permission or compensating the people who wrote the original works. The legal challenges are coming not just from writers but visual artists, music labels and other creators who allege that generative AI profits have been built on misappropriation. Anthropic and other tech companies have argued that training of AI models fits into the "fair use" doctrine of U.S. laws that allows for limited uses of copyrighted materials such as for teaching, research or transforming the copyrighted work into something different. But the lawsuit against Anthropic accuses it of using a dataset called The Pile that included a trove of pirated books. It also disputes the idea that AI systems are learning 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 says. The Associated Press and OpenAI have a licensing and technology agreement that allows OpenAI access to part of AP's text archives.

Google, Amazon-backed Anthropic faces copyright lawsuit over AI model's training

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.

Authors take Anthropic to court in copyright infringement case

The authors claim Anthropic has engaged in a 'largescale theft of copyrighted works' to train its AI model Claude and is seeking compensation for these actions. AI start-up Anthropic is facing accusations from a trio of authors that it used copyrighted works to train its AI models without permission or compensation. The three authors - Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson - said Anthropic used pirated versions of various copyrighted material to train Claude, its flagship AI model. The authors said this material was used to train Claude to respond to human prompts more effectively. In a filing with a US district court, the plaintiffs claim that the "largescale theft of copyrighted works" is a key component of Anthropic's business model. "Anthropic downloaded known pirated versions of Plaintiffs' works, made copies of them, and fed these pirated copies into its models," the court filing reads. "Anthropic took these drastic steps to help computer algorithms generate human-like text responses. Anthropic has not even attempted to compensate Plaintiffs for the use of their material. In fact, Anthropic has taken multiple steps to hide the full extent of its copyright theft. "The end result is a model built on the work of thousands of authors, meant to mimic the syntax, style and themes of the copyrighted works on which it was trained." The authors are seeking compensation for Anthropic's actions and want to permanently stop the company from using their copyrighted works. Neither Anthropic or the authors' lawyers responded to requests for comment from Reuters. The latest lawsuit joins the growing pile of copyright infringement allegations against multiple AI companies, with concerns that their technology is trained on massive amounts of content from artists, authors and other creative sectors. Last week, a copyright lawsuit filed by a group of artists against companies using text-to-image generators was allowed to proceed by a US judge. In February 2023, Getty Images sued Stability AI in a US court, accusing the start-up of "brazen infringement" of its intellectual property "on a staggering scale". OpenAI is in the middle of a major lawsuit from The New York Times, which claims AI models such as ChatGPT have copied and use millions of copyrighted news articles, in-depth investigations and other journalistic work. Find out how emerging tech trends are transforming tomorrow with our new podcast, Future Human: The Series. Listen now on Spotify, on Apple or wherever you get your podcasts.

Authors sue Claude AI chatbot creator Anthropic for copyright infringement

The lawsuit filed Monday in a federal court in San Francisco alleges that Anthropic's actions "have made a mockery of its lofty goals" by tapping into repositories of pirated writings to build its AI product. "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 says.A group of authors is suing artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, alleging it committed "large-scale theft" in training its popular chatbot Claude on pirated copies of copyrighted books. While similar lawsuits have piled up for more than a year against competitor OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, this is the first from writers to target Anthropic and its Claude chatbot. The smaller San Francisco-based company - founded by ex-OpenAI leaders - has marketed itself as the more responsible and safety-focused developer of generative AI models that can compose emails, summarize documents and interact with people in a natural way. But the lawsuit filed Monday in a federal court in San Francisco alleges that Anthropic's actions "have made a mockery of its lofty goals" by tapping into repositories of pirated writings to build its AI product. "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 says. Anthropic didn't immediately respond to a request for comment Monday. The lawsuit was brought by a trio of writers - Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson - who are seeking to represent a class of similarly situated authors of fiction and nonfiction. While it's the first case against Anthropic from book authors, the company is also fighting a lawsuit by major music publishers alleging that Claude regurgitates the lyrics of copyrighted songs. The authors' case joins a growing number of lawsuits filed against developers of AI large language models in San Francisco and New York. OpenAI and its business partner Microsoft are already battling a group of copyright infringement cases led by household names like John Grisham, Jodi Picoult and "Game of Thrones" novelist George R. R. Martin; and another set of lawsuits from media outlets such as The New York Times, Chicago Tribune and Mother Jones. What links all the cases is the claim that tech companies ingested huge troves of human writings to train AI chatbots to produce human-like passages of text, without getting permission or compensating the people who wrote the original works. The legal challenges are coming not just from writers but visual artists, music labels and other creators who allege that generative AI profits have been built on misappropriation. Anthropic and other tech companies have argued that training of AI models fits into the "fair use" doctrine of U.S. laws that allows for limited uses of copyrighted materials such as for teaching, research or transforming the copyrighted work into something different. But the lawsuit against Anthropic accuses it of using a dataset called The Pile that included a trove of pirated books. It also disputes the idea that AI systems are learning 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 says.

Authors sue Claude AI chatbot creator Anthropic for copyright infringement

A group of authors is suing artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, alleging it committed "large-scale theft" in training its popular chatbot Claude on pirated copies of copyrighted books. While similar lawsuits have piled up for more than a year against competitor OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, this is the first from writers to target Anthropic and its Claude chatbot. The smaller San Francisco-based company -- founded by ex-OpenAI leaders -- has marketed itself as the more responsible and safety-focused developer of generative AI models that can compose emails, summarize documents and interact with people in a natural way. But the lawsuit filed Monday in a federal court in San Francisco alleges that Anthropic's actions "have made a mockery of its lofty goals" by tapping into repositories of pirated writings to build its AI product. "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 says. Anthropic didn't immediately respond to a request for comment Monday. The lawsuit was brought by a trio of writers -- Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson -- who are seeking to represent a class of similarly situated authors of fiction and nonfiction. While it's the first case against Anthropic from book authors, the company is also fighting a lawsuit by major music publishers alleging that Claude regurgitates the lyrics of copyrighted songs. The authors' case joins a growing number of lawsuits filed against developers of AI large language models in San Francisco and New York. OpenAI and its business partner Microsoft are already battling a group of copyright infringement cases led by household names like John Grisham, Jodi Picoult and "Game of Thrones" novelist George R. R. Martin; and another set of lawsuits from media outlets such as The New York Times, Chicago Tribune and Mother Jones. What links all the cases is the claim that tech companies ingested huge troves of human writings to train AI chatbots to produce human-like passages of text, without getting permission or compensating the people who wrote the original works. The legal challenges are coming not just from writers but visual artists, music labels and other creators who allege that generative AI profits have been built on misappropriation. Anthropic and other tech companies have argued that training of AI models fits into the "fair use" doctrine of U.S. laws that allows for limited uses of copyrighted materials such as for teaching, research or transforming the copyrighted work into something different. But the lawsuit against Anthropic accuses it of using a dataset called The Pile that included a trove of pirated books. It also disputes the idea that AI systems are learning 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 says. -- -- -- The Associated Press and OpenAI have a licensing and technology agreement that allows OpenAI access to part of AP's text archives.

Authors Sue Claude AI Chatbot Creator Anthropic for Copyright Infringement

A group of authors is suing artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, alleging it committed "large-scale theft" in training its popular chatbot Claude on pirated copies of copyrighted books. While similar lawsuits have piled up for more than a year against competitor OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, this is the first from writers to target Anthropic and its Claude chatbot. The smaller San Francisco-based company -- founded by ex-OpenAI leaders -- has marketed itself as the more responsible and safety-focused developer of generative AI models that can compose emails, summarize documents and interact with people in a natural way. But the lawsuit filed Monday in a federal court in San Francisco alleges that Anthropic's actions "have made a mockery of its lofty goals" by tapping into repositories of pirated writings to build its AI product. "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 says. Anthropic didn't immediately respond to a request for comment Monday. The lawsuit was brought by a trio of writers -- Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson -- who are seeking to represent a class of similarly situated authors of fiction and nonfiction. While it's the first case against Anthropic from book authors, the company is also fighting a lawsuit by major music publishers alleging that Claude regurgitates the lyrics of copyrighted songs. The authors' case joins a growing number of lawsuits filed against developers of AI large language models in San Francisco and New York. OpenAI and its business partner Microsoft are already battling a group of copyright infringement cases led by household names like John Grisham, Jodi Picoult and "Game of Thrones" novelist George R. R. Martin; and another set of lawsuits from media outlets such as The New York Times, Chicago Tribune and Mother Jones. What links all the cases is the claim that tech companies ingested huge troves of human writings to train AI chatbots to produce human-like passages of text, without getting permission or compensating the people who wrote the original works. The legal challenges are coming not just from writers but visual artists, music labels and other creators who allege that generative AI profits have been built on misappropriation. Anthropic and other tech companies have argued that training of AI models fits into the "fair use" doctrine of U.S. laws that allows for limited uses of copyrighted materials such as for teaching, research or transforming the copyrighted work into something different. But the lawsuit against Anthropic accuses it of using a dataset called The Pile that included a trove of pirated books. It also disputes the idea that AI systems are learning 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 says. -- -- -- The Associated Press and OpenAI have a licensing and technology agreement that allows OpenAI access to part of AP's text archives. Copyright 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

AI Startup Anthropic Faces Copyright Infringement Lawsuit From 3 Authors

Artificial intelligence (AI) startup Anthropic is reportedly the target of a copyright infringement lawsuit filed Tuesday (Aug. 20) in California. Three authors allege in the lawsuit that the company built its business and its large language model (LLM) Claude through "the largescale theft of copyrighted works," CNBC reported Tuesday. The plaintiffs -- Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson -- allege that their works were among the ones downloaded from pirated and illegal websites, copied and used to build Anthropic's AI models, according to the report. Anthropic did not immediately reply to PYMNTS' request for comment. This report comes about 10 months after Anthropic was sued by Universal Music and two other labels that alleged that the AI firm scraped the record companies' artists' songs without consent and used them to create "identical or nearly identical copies of those lyrics" using the generative AI chatbot Claude. "This copyrighted material is not free for the taking simply because it can be found on the internet," the filing said, arguing that Anthropic had "never even attempted" to license the songs. Anthropic is not the only AI company to face a lawsuit from authors and publishers. OpenAI and Microsoft were sued in June by the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR), the nonprofit news organization that produces Mother Jones and Reveal, which alleged that the companies committed copyright violations. An OpenAI spokesperson told PYMNTS at the time: "We are working collaboratively with the news industry and partnering with global news publishers to display their content in our products like ChatGPT, including summaries, quotes and attribution, to drive traffic back to the original articles." OpenAI and Microsoft were also targeted with a proposed class action lawsuit filed in January. In that suit, nonfiction authors Nicholas Basbanes and Nicholas Gage alleged that the companies violated their copyrights by improperly using their works to train AI models, including the chatbot ChatGPT and other AI-based services. AI infringement issues are escalating as companies increasingly use copyrighted materials to train sophisticated algorithms without the creators' consent, PYMNTS reported in March. Experts say the problem underscores the need for clearer guidelines and protections in the field of AI.

Claude AI chatbot creator Anthropic sued by authors for copyright infringement

A group of authors is suing artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, alleging it committed "large-scale theft" in training its popular chatbot Claude on pirated copies of copyrighted books. While similar lawsuits have piled up for more than a year against competitor OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, this is the first from writers to target Anthropic and its Claude chatbot. The smaller San Francisco-based company -- founded by ex-OpenAI leaders -- has marketed itself as the more responsible and safety-focused developer of generative AI models that can compose emails, summarise documents, and interact with people in a natural way. But the lawsuit filed Monday in a federal court in San Francisco alleges that Anthropic's actions "have made a mockery of its lofty goals" by tapping into repositories of pirated writings to build its AI product. (Unravel the complexities of our digital world on The Interface podcast, where business leaders and scientists share insights that shape tomorrow's innovation. The Interface is also available on YouTube, Apple Podcasts and Spotify.) Ex-OpenAI executive Jan Leike joins Amazon-backed Anthropic "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 says. Anthropic didn't immediately respond to a request for comment Monday. The lawsuit was brought by a trio of writers -- Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson -- who are seeking to represent a class of similarly situated authors of fiction and nonfiction. While it's the first case against Anthropic from book authors, the company is also fighting a lawsuit by major music publishers alleging that Claude regurgitates the lyrics of copyrighted songs. The authors' case joins a growing number of lawsuits filed against developers of AI large language models in San Francisco and New York. OpenAI and its business partner Microsoft are already battling a group of copyright infringement cases led by household names like John Grisham, Jodi Picoult and "Game of Thrones" novelist George R. R. Martin; and another set of lawsuits from media outlets such as The New York Times, Chicago Tribune and Mother Jones. Anthropic launches newest AI model, three months after its last What links all the cases is the claim that tech companies ingested huge troves of human writings to train AI chatbots to produce human-like passages of text, without getting permission or compensating the people who wrote the original works. The legal challenges are coming not just from writers but visual artists, music labels and other creators who allege that generative AI profits have been built on misappropriation. Anthropic and other tech companies have argued that training of AI models fits into the "fair use" doctrine of U.S. laws that allows for limited uses of copyrighted materials such as for teaching, research or transforming the copyrighted work into something different. But the lawsuit against Anthropic accuses it of using a dataset called The Pile that included a trove of pirated books. It also disputes the idea that AI systems are learning 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 says. Read Comments

Why authors are suing this Amazon backed AI company

As the debate over AI Vs humans continues, there seems to be a rising misuse of AI Anthropic, which is an artificial intelligence (AI) company backed by Amazon, faced a lawsuit for copyright infringement by notable authors. As reported by Reuters, Claude,the company's AI chatbot has been accused of being trained with pirated works of writers/journalists. On Monday, the complaint was filed by writers and journalists Charles Graeber, Andrea Bartz, and Kirk Wallace Johnson. They claimed that Anthropic used 'pirated version' of their works for adding them in Claude AI as responses to human prompts. Anthropic faces copyright infringement The authors mentioned in their complaint that "Anthropic has built a multibillion-dollar business by stealing hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books," according to Reuters. The authors further added that Anthropic shows itself as a company for the public, aiming to improve humanity which might not be true. They claim that by promoting copyrighted works, it has miserably failed and has the potential to cause mass destruction. Additionally, the lawsuit also included several other high-stakes complaints filed by copyright holders. This included news outlets, visual artists and record labels on the material used by tech companies to train their generative AI systems. In response to this , a spokesperson for Anthropic said on Tuesday that the company was already aware of the lawsuit. However, after analysing the complaint they decided to decline to comment further, citing pending litigation. Furthermore, the lawsuit also asked for a sum of money as monetary damages which is yet to be disclosed. The lawsuit also asked for an order to block Anthropic permanently from misusing the authors' work. The way ahead As the debate over artificial intelligence (AI) Vs humans continues, there seems to be a rising misuse of AI. This is not the first time that companies have faced allegations of copyright infringement for illegally using content to feed large language models (LMS) for their AI chatbots. Last year during the month of October, Music publishers ABKCO, Concord Publishing and Universal Music, complained against Anthropic for copyright infringement. On October 19, they sued Anthropic in the federal court of Tennessee. Anthropic was alleged of misusing a large number of copyrighted song lyrics for training its chatbot Claude. According to the lawsuit the company had violated the publishers' rights by using lyrics from about 500 songs. Some of these songs included popular records such as God Only Knows, the Beach Boys', the Rolling Stones'. It also used lyrics from Gimme Shelter by Mark Ronson and Uptown Funk by Bruno Mars and Halo by Beyoncé's, among others.

Authors sue Amazon-backed Anthropic, claiming the company has "built a multibillion-dollar business by stealing...." - Times of India

Amazon-backed artificial intelligence company Anthropic has been sued by three authors who claim that the company has misused their books and others to train its AI-powered chatbot Claude. The authors, as reported by Reuters, have filed a class-action lawsuit against Anthropic in California. The lawsuit requests an unspecified amount of monetary damages and an order permanently blocking Anthropic from misusing the authors' work. What the authors claim Writers and journalists Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson filed the lawsuit on Tuesday. The authors said in their complaint that Anthropic has "built a multibillion-dollar business by stealing hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books." They said that Anthropic used pirated versions of their works and others to teach Claude to respond to human prompts. They claim that ClaudeAI was trained on dataset called "The Pile" that includes a significant portion called Books3 - a collection of pirated ebooks from popular authors such as Stephen King and Michael Poll. "Just like the developers of other technologies that have come before, from the printing press to the copy machine to the web-crawler, AI companies must follow the law," the authors demanded," the authors demanded. What Anthropic said The report quotes an Anthropic spokesperson who said that the company was aware of the lawsuit and assessing the complaint. However, the spokesperson declined to comment further, citing pending litigation. This is not the first case where a lawsuit has been filed against a tech company over alleged misuse of copyright data to train AI models. Separate groups of authors have sued OpenAI and Meta Platforms over the companies' alleged misuse of their work to train the large-language models underlying their chatbots. The TOI Tech Desk is a dedicated team of journalists committed to delivering the latest and most relevant news from the world of technology to readers of The Times of India. TOI Tech Desk's news coverage spans a wide spectrum across gadget launches, gadget reviews, trends, in-depth analysis, exclusive reports and breaking stories that impact technology and the digital universe. Be it how-tos or the latest happenings in AI, cybersecurity, personal gadgets, platforms like WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook and more; TOI Tech Desk brings the news with accuracy and authenticity.

A 'Pile' Of Pirated Work: Authors Sue Anthropic AI, Joining YouTuber Backlash

(Credit: SOPA Images / Contributeur / LightRocket via Getty Images) Three authors filed a class action lawsuit against Anthropic on Monday, alleging the AI company trains its models on pirated versions of copyrighted books, found in a public dataset called The Pile. "Anthropic has built a multibillion-dollar business by stealing hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books," the suit says. "Rather than obtaining permission and paying a fair price for the creations it exploits, Anthropic pirated them." Plaintiffs Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson have all published multiple books, including bestsellers. They join three other authors who sued Nvidia in March for training its AI models on book data in The Pile. YouTubers also spoke out against this dataset last month after an investigation found it contains transcripts from 173,000 videos, taken without creator consent. Anthropic uses this data to improve its Claude chatbot, which the company claims performs better than OpenAI's flagship model. Anthropic is projecting $850 million in revenue in 2024, according to The Information, and has around $6 billion in funding from Google and Amazon. The suit claims this success comes on the back of unpaid creative work, and that Anthropic has "not even attempted" to pay the authors. "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 suit says. PCMag reached out to Anthropic for comment and will update this story if we hear back. Shawn Presser, one of The Pile's creators, created the trove of text in 2020. He compiled the text of nearly 200,000 books from the notorious pirating site Bibliotik, and named the collection Books3. Although the original Books3 file was removed from The Pile in August 2023 due to copyright complaints, the suit alleges it remains available in other sources. "It is apparent that Anthropic downloaded and reproduced copies of The Pile and Books3, knowing that these datasets were comprised of a trove of copyrighted content sourced from pirate websites like Bibiliotik," the suit says. The complaint quotes Anthropic discussing its use of data from The Pile on multiple occasions, as recently as July 2024. In addition to hoovering up preexisting data from the web, AI companies are working to secure the rights to newly created content. OpenAI has struck licensing deals with major publishers and websites, such as The Wall Street Journal, Reddit, and this week Condé Nast. However, these deals rightly involve paying the publications for the work, and the publisher's consent.

Google, Amazon-Backed OpenAI-Rival Anthropic Faces Class-Action Lawsuit Over Alleged Copyright Infringement

Alphabet Inc.'s Google, and the Amazon-backed AI startup Anthropic, a rival to ChatGPT's parent company OpenAI, is facing a class-action lawsuit filed by three authors, alleging copyright infringement in the training of its AI chatbot. What Happened: In a complaint filed on Monday, authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson have accused Anthropic of using pirated versions of their books, reported Reuters. The lawsuit, filed in a California federal court, alleges that Anthropic has built a multibillion-dollar business by misusing copyrighted books. See Also: Google Says Opening Up Its App Store Is Expensive And Too Much Work, Gets Told By Judge, 'We're Going To Tear The Barriers Down' The authors' works were reportedly included in a dataset of pirated books used to train its AI-powered chatbot, Claude. The lawsuit seeks an unspecified amount in damages and a permanent injunction against Anthropic's alleged misuse of the authors' work. Anthropic did not immediately respond to Benzinga's request for comments. Subscribe to the Benzinga Tech Trends newsletter to get all the latest tech developments delivered to your inbox. Why It Matters: This is not the first time an AI company has been sued for copyright infringement. Last year in October, Universal Music Group filed a lawsuit against Anthropic for allegedly using their songs without permission to train Claude. Moreover, other AI companies have faced similar lawsuits including OpenAI, Meta Platforms, and Microsoft. In February 2024, a federal judge dismissed most of the claims made by authors against OpenAI for using copyrighted books to train its AI chatbot. However, the judge allowed a claim for violating California's unfair competition law to proceed. In May 2024, eight U.S. newspaper publishers filed a lawsuit against Microsoft and OpenAI for allegedly using their articles without permission in AI products. Image Credits - Shutterstock Check out more of Benzinga's Consumer Tech coverage by following this link. Read Next: Apple iPhone 16 Launch Date Reportedly Set For Sept 10: Here's Everything We Know About Cupertino's Upcoming Flagship Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of AI tools and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors. Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs