Three writers have sued Anthropic, a business that makes artificial intelligence, on behalf of all of its customers, saying that it violated their copyright. The case says that the company trained its AI-powered robot, Claude, with illegally copied copies of their books and many others.
Journalists and writers Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson are the claimants. They say that Anthropic put their copyrighted works in data sets that came from illegal websites. The lawsuit says that Anthropic could have legally bought rights for the materials but instead chose to use stolen content, which was done on purpose to save time when building its AI models.
The Northern California District Court case says that Anthropic’s actions have not only broken copyright laws but also hurt the company’s public promises to respect “AI safety” and “responsibility.” The authors say that Anthropic’s actions have hurt producers a lot and are part of a larger trend where writers are losing money in jobs like news, copywriting, and making content for the web because of the rise of generative AI.
The claimants want the court to decide if Anthropic’s acts violate copyright and if they can get money for their losses. Another thing they want is a lasting order to stop Anthropic from using copyrighted works without permission.
This case is one of many that AI companies are facing because they use protected content in their training data. Big companies like Amazon and Google have put a lot of money into Anthropic. However, music producers are suing the company again because they say it used song lyrics inappropriately to train its AI models.
It’s possible that the result of this case will have big effects on the AI field, especially on how companies get and use protected content when making big language models like Claude. The claimants want the multibillion-dollar company to be held responsible and pay them for using their intellectual property without their permission.
