Another Roadblock In Training AI Model: Authors Sue Anthropic For Allegedly Using Pirated Books To Train Claude AI

Anthropic has been accused of making a multibillion-dollar business by stealing hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books, including those of Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson.

The rapid growth of AI has been witnessed because they have used a huge dataset comprising millions of users without their consent to train their AI models on. Recently, the debate between privacy and the training of AI chatbots has picked up pace. Users are concerned about their privacy and safety, and the leaders at tech giants, including Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman, have said that anything that is available online can be used freely to train their AI chatbots. Now the world of AI has hit another such roadblock.

The startup behind the chatbot Claude AI, Anthropic, has been sued over alleged copyright infringement for the second time now. This class action lawsuit has been filed by three authors, namely - Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson. The lawsuit has been filed in a federal court in California, United States of America (US). According to the lawsuit, Anthropic has been accused of making a multibillion-dollar business by stealing hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books, including the works of the said authors.

What Does The Lawsuit Say

The lawsuit read, “An essential component of Anthropic’s business model — and its flagship ‘Claude’ family of large language models (or ‘LLMs’)— is the large-scale theft of copyrighted works. Anthropic downloaded known pirated versions of Plaintiffs’ works, made copies of them, and fed these pirated copies into its models.”

It added, “Copyright law prohibits what Anthropic has done here: downloading and copying hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books taken from pirated and illegal websites.”

As AI-generated content becomes more common, developers of large language models like Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini are facing legal challenges from news organisations, music groups, and publishing companies. These lawsuits aim to determine whether these tech firms breached copyright laws by training their AI models on extensive datasets of copyrighted content, or if such practices are protected under fair use provisions.

Anthropic, established by former OpenAI employees, has reportedly secured funding from major tech giants such as Amazon, Google, and Salesforce. In June, the company introduced its most sophisticated AI model to date, named Claude 3.5 Sonnet.

Earlier in October last year, Universal Music Group, along with other music publishers, sued Anthropic over alleged “systematic and widespread infringement of their copyrighted song lyrics.” The lawsuit referenced Katy Perry’s song "Roar" and Gloria Gaynor’s "I Will Survive" as examples of copyrighted lyrics that the AI chatbot produced in response to user prompts.