Anthropic, an artificial intelligence firm supported by Amazon, was the target of a class-action lawsuit filed in federal court in California on Monday due to claims of copyright infringement.
TakeAway Points:
- The AI startup Anthropic, backed by Amazon, was the target of a class-action lawsuit on Monday in a California federal court for allegedly violating copyright.
- According to the filing, three authors claimed that Anthropic “built a multibillion-dollar business by stealing hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books,” including their own.
- Former OpenAI research executives founded Anthropic, which also has support from Google and Salesforce.
Class-action lawsuit against Anthropic
Three authors said in the filing that Anthropic “built a multibillion-dollar business by stealing hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books,” including their own. Anthropic, which was founded by ex-OpenAI research executives, has backers including Google and Salesforce.
Authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson alleged in the lawsuit that “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,” later alleging that “Anthropic downloaded known pirated versions of Plaintiffs’ works, made copies of them, and fed these pirated copies into its models.”
The lawsuit follows Anthropic’s June debut of its most powerful AI model yet, the Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Claude is one of the chatbots that, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, have exploded in popularity in the past year.
“Copyright law prohibits what Anthropic has done here: downloading and copying hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books taken from pirated and illegal websites,” the lawsuit states.
Previous lawsuits against Anthropic
This week’s case also follows another lawsuit brought against Anthropic last October, in which Universal Music sued the startup over “systematic and widespread infringement of their copyrighted song lyrics,” per a filing in a Tennessee federal court. Other music publishers, such as Concord and ABKCO, were also named as plaintiffs.
One example from Universal Music’s lawsuit: When a user asked Anthropic’s AI chatbot Claude about the lyrics to the song “Roar” by Katy Perry, it generated an “almost identical copy of those lyrics,” violating the rights of Concord, the copyright owner, per the filing. The lawsuit also named Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” as an example of Anthropic’s alleged copyright infringement, as Universal owns the rights to its lyrics.
“In the process of building and operating AI models, Anthropic unlawfully copies and disseminates vast amounts of copyrighted works,” the lawsuit stated, later adding, “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.”
With the news industry broadly struggling to maintain sufficient advertising and subscription revenue to pay for its costly newsgathering operations, many news publications and media outlets are aggressively trying to protect their businesses as AI-generated content becomes more prevalent.
The Centre for Investigative Reporting, the country’s oldest nonprofit newsroom, sued OpenAI and lead backer Microsoft in federal court in June for alleged copyright infringement, following similar suits from publications including The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, and The New York Daily News.
