Anthropic is facing a class-action lawsuit in California federal court filed by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson. They allege that the AI company used pirated copies of their books, along with hundreds of thousands of others, to train its chatbot, Claude.
This lawsuit follows a similar case brought by music publishers and adds to a growing list of complaints against tech companies for using copyrighted material to train AI systems. The authors seek monetary damages and a permanent injunction against Anthropic’s use of their works. Anthropic has yet to comment.
“Anthropic styles itself as a public benefit company, designed to improve humanity. For holders of copyrighted works, however, Anthropic already has wrought mass destruction,” stated the complaint. “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.”
