Three authors have recently taken legal action against the AI startup Anthropic, accusing the company of illegally using their copyrighted works to train their chatbot, Claude. This lawsuit marks a significant development within the AI industry, as it follows a growing trend of copyright challenges aimed at AI chatbots.
The authors, Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, are seeking to represent a broader group of authors whose fiction and non-fiction works have been unlawfully used by Anthropic without compensation. They allege that the company, which has successfully raised over $7 billion in funding over the past year, engaged in “large-scale theft” by incorporating copyrighted materials into the training data without obtaining proper permissions.
While similar lawsuits have been filed against OpenAI and its chatbot ChatGPT, this particular case is the first of its kind against Anthropic, a smaller San Francisco-based startup. Anthropic was co-founded by siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei, both of whom previously worked at OpenAI.
Despite Anthropic’s reputation for being safety-conscious, this legal action raises concerns about intellectual property rights and the responsibility of AI companies to properly acquire and utilize copyrighted content. The outcome of this lawsuit could have significant implications on the future practices and regulations in the AI industry, specifically pertaining to the ethical use of intellectual property.