Authors sue Anthropic for allegedly using pirated books to train Claude, its AI model

“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,” the lawsuit argues, adding that “Anthropic downloaded known pirated versions of Plaintiffs’ works, made copies of them, and fed these pirated copies into its models.”

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

With AI-generated content becoming increasingly prevalent, developers of LLMs such as Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini are being taken to court by news organisations, music groups, publishing houses, and others to settle the pressing question of whether these tech companies violated copyright law by training their AI models on vast datasets of copyrighted material, or if it falls under fair use.

Anthropic was founded by former employees of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and has reportedly received funding from Amazon as well as Google and Salesforce. In June, the company unveiled its most advanced AI model so far called Claude 3.5 Sonnet.

Universal Music Group, along with other music publishers, filed a lawsuit against Anthropic in October 2023 over alleged “systematic and widespread infringement of their copyrighted song lyrics.” The lawsuit cited singer Katy Perry’s song “Roar” and Gloria Gaynor’s song “I Will Survive” as examples of copyrighted lyrics that had been generated by the AI chatbot when prompted by users.

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