Anthropic was sued Monday by three authors who claim the machine learning lab illegally used their copyrighted work to train its Claude AI model.
Claude AI Creator Anthropic Sued by author alleging use of pirated books
"Anthropic has built a multi-billion dollar business by stealing hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books," the complaint [PDF] filed in California states. "Instead of obtaining permission and paying a fair price for the creations it exploits, Anthropic pirated them."
The lawsuit, filed by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson, seeks to be recognized as a class action. The trio claims that Anthropic is screwing authors out of their income by generating, on demand for Claude's users, a flood of AI-generated titles in a fraction of the time it takes a human author to complete a book.
Claude couldn't generate this kind of long-form content unless it was trained on a large volume of books, books that Anthropic paid nothing to write.
