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The authors claim Anthropic has engaged in ‘largescale theft of copyrighted works’ to train its AI model Claude and is seeking compensation for these actions.
AI start-up Anthropic is facing accusations from a trio of authors that it used copyrighted works to train its AI models without permission or compensation.
The three authors – Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson – said Anthropic used pirated versions of various copyrighted material to train Claude, its flagship AI model. The authors said this material was used to train Claude to respond to human prompts more effectively.
In a filing with a US district court in California, the plaintiffs claim that the “largescale theft of copyrighted works” is a key component of Anthropic’s business model.
“Anthropic downloaded known pirated versions of plaintiffs’ works, made copies of them and fed these pirated copies into its models,” the court filing reads. “Anthropic took these drastic steps to help computer algorithms generate human-like text responses. 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.
“The end result is a model built on the work of thousands of authors, meant to mimic the syntax, style and themes of the copyrighted works on which it was trained.”
The authors are seeking compensation for Anthropic’s actions and want to permanently stop the company from using their copyrighted works. A spokesperson for Anthropic told Reuters it was aware of the complaint but refused to comment further. The author’s lawyers declined to comment.
The latest lawsuit joins the growing pile of copyright infringement allegations against multiple AI companies, with concerns that their technology is trained on massive amounts of content from artists, authors and other creative sectors.
Last week, a copyright lawsuit filed by a group of artists against companies using text-to-image generators was allowed to proceed by a US judge. In February 2023, Getty Images sued Stability AI in a US court, accusing the start-up of “brazen infringement” of its intellectual property “on a staggering scale”.
OpenAI is in the middle of a major lawsuit from The New York Times, which claims AI models including ChatGPT have illegally copied and use millions of copyrighted news articles, in-depth investigations and other journalistic work.
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