Amazon-backed Anthropic AI sued by authors for "stealing" hundreds of copyrighted books

Anthropic AI

Amazon-backed AI startup Anthropic has been sued by a group of writers for “stealing” hundreds of copyrighted books. According to a report by Reuters, a class action lawsuit has been filed against Anthropic in a California court.

In the lawsuit, the authors allege that Anthropic’s Claude AI chatbots were trained on a vast, publicly available dataset called “The Pile.” This dataset includes a significant portion called Books3, which contains a large collection of pirated ebooks from popular authors such as Stephen King and Michael Pollan.

“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 authors say in the lawsuit.

What do the authors want?

The lawsuit alleges that Anthropic has not even attempted to compensate Plaintiffs for the use of their material. “In fact, Anthropic has taken multiple steps to hide the full extent of its copyright theft,” reads the lawsuit. The authors want Anthropic to stop engaging in infringement of copyrighted content. “Just like the developers of other technologies that have come before, from the printing press to the copy machine to the web-crawler, AI companies must follow the law,” the authors demanded.

Anthropic has a popular generative AI chatbot called Claude, which competes with Google’s Gemini AI, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Meta AI.

This legal action is part of a growing trend of copyright infringement lawsuits against AI companies. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, and Meta Platforms have also faced similar lawsuits from authors and other creators. In the last one year or so, there has been a strong demand over regulating the use of copyrighted material to train AI models.