Authors sue this AI company for copyright infringement

Three Authors filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Amazon-backed artificial intelligence alleging that it committed "large-scale theft" in training its popular chatbot Claude.

The lawsuit was filed by writers Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson in a federal court in California claiming that they were not paid "a cent" for copying their work.

They allege that Claude chatbots were trained on a publicly available dataset called “The Pile.”

“It is apparent that Anthropic downloaded and reproduced copies of The Pile and Books3, knowing that these datasets were comprised of a trove of copyrighted content sourced from pirate websites like Bibiliotik,” the lawsuit said.

“Anthropic styles itself as a public benefit company, designed to improve humanity. For holders of copyrighted works, however, Anthropic already has wrought mass destruction,” the authors said.

It added that Anthropic seeks “to profit from strip-mining the human expression and ingenuity behind each one of those works.”

Authors are seeking an unspecified amount of monetary damages and an order to permanently block Anthropic from misusing their work.

The authors’ case joins a growing number of lawsuits filed against AI developers. A separate group of authors sued OpenAI and Meta Platforms for alleged misuse of their work to train the large-language models.

PitchMark helps innovators deter idea theft, so that third parties that they share their idea with get the idea but don’t take it. Visit PitchMark.net and register for free as a PitchMark member today.