A group of authors has filed a lawsuit against artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, accusing the company of committing “large-scale theft” by training its popular chatbot Claude on pirated copies of copyrighted books. This is the first lawsuit from writers targeting Anthropic and its Claude chatbot.
The lawsuit alleges that Anthropic’s actions have undermined its claims to be a more responsible and safety-focused developer of generative AI models. The company has marketed itself as a leader in creating AI products that can compose emails, summarize documents, and interact with people in a natural way.
However, the lawsuit claims that Anthropic has tapped into repositories of pirated writings to build its AI product, making a mockery of its lofty goals. “It is no exaggeration to say that Anthropic’s model seeks to profit from strip-mining the human expression and ingenuity behind each one of those works,” the lawsuit says.
Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The lawsuit was brought by three writers who are seeking to represent a class of similarly situated authors of fiction and nonfiction.
This case joins a growing number of lawsuits filed against developers of AI large language models in San Francisco and New York, including cases against OpenAI and its business partner Microsoft. All the cases involve claims that tech companies ingested huge troves of human writings without permission or compensation to train AI chatbots to produce human-like passages of text.
Anthropic and other tech companies have argued that training of AI models fits into the “fair use” doctrine, but the lawsuit against Anthropic disputes this idea. The authors claim that humans who learn from books buy lawful copies of them, providing at least some measure of compensation to authors and creators.
Source: https://apnews.com/article/authors-sue-anthropic-claude-ai-chatbot-chatgpt-copyright-54ae787070bdfc8019ab29b70487c02d