AI Startup Anthropic Hit with Lawsuit Over Copyright Infringement

Amazon-backed AI startup, Anthropic, is facing legal battles for allegedly breaching copyright laws while training its famous chatbot Claude.

According to authors who are suing the AI company, Anthropic has been involved in “large-scale theft” of copyrighted material, particularly books, to train its chatbot.

Anthropic trained its products by using pirated copies of different writings, the lawsuit continued, and that the company made money by stealing the creative work of a range of writers. Charles Graeber, Andrea Bartz, and Kirk Wallace Johnson are the three writers who initiated the lawsuit and are positioning themselves to represent a large number of writers whose work is being stolen.

The lawsuit further mentioned that writers get compensation when humans buy their books and want to learn from them, which will not be the case when they learn about the books through Large Language Models (LLMs).

This is not the first legal battle Athoropic is facing at the moment. Previously, a group of music publishers sued the company for regurgitating the lyrics of copyrighted songs.

Earlier this year, the company launched the Claude mobile app, which generated more than $1 million in revenue within 16 weeks of its launch. Claude’s biggest competitor remains Open AI’s ChatGPT, which took the world by storm right after its launch in November 2022.

Anthropic’s founders, who are former employees of Open AI, have branded their company as more safety-focused and claim to develop technology that “put(s) safety at the frontier.” The lawsuit further mentioned that writers get compensation when humans buy their books and want to learn from them, which will not be the case when they learn about the books through LLMs.

ChatGPT’s historic launch kicked off a new era in artificial intelligence as thousands of AI-based apps started circulating on the internet in the upcoming months. However, ChatGpt’s arrival also mobilized a large number of authors who believed that the chatbot was stealing their hard work, which ultimately resulted in their financial loss.

Famous authors like Jodi Picoult, John Grisham, and George R. R. Martin, as well as media organizations like the New York Times, have sued OpenAI. As of now, no major ruling has come against AI companies, which is still allowing them to pursue allegedly fraudulent practices for monetary gains.

Most AI companies have maintained that they followed “fair use” doctrine to use any material to train their models.

Meanwhile some other media organizations like Time Magazine have partnered with Open AI and granted them access to 101 years of its archives as they suggested that adopting the latest technology will kick-off a new era of journalism.