Anthropic Faces Copyright Infringement Lawsuit From Authors Over AI Training
Anthropic, an artificial intelligence (AI) firm, is purportedly the focus of a copyright infringement case filed in California.
Three writers, Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, filed the action to represent a class of similarly situated fiction and nonfiction authors.
The lawsuit, filed on August 19, said that the AI company “intentionally downloaded known pirated copies of books from the internet.”
Anthropic was created by former OpenAI founders and has positioned itself as a more responsible AI player, advocating the concept of “Constitutional AI” using chatbots that follow a common set of programming principles.
However, this lawsuit undermines that image by charging the corporation with widespread copyright violation.
Notably, the case against Anthropic is part of a larger legal trend targeting AI companies for copyright violations.
The report comes about ten months after Anthropic was sued by Universal Music and two other labels, who claimed that the AI firm scrapped the record companies’ artists’ songs without their permission and used them to create “identical or nearly identical copies of those lyrics” with the generative AI chatbot Claude.
Anthropic and other AI businesses have claimed that using copyrighted resources for AI training fits under US law’s “fair use” theory.
This theory permits the restricted use of copyrighted works for reasons such as research or transformation into something else.
However, this interpretation is being contested in the most recent action against Anthropic.
The plaintiffs argue that fair usage does not apply to AI training because AI systems do not learn in the same ways that humans do.
To demonstrate this, they argue: “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.”
We earlier reported that the UK antitrust regulator, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), has opened a formal investigation into the alliance between Amazon.com, Inc. and the artificial intelligence startup Anthropic PBC.
