Authors sue Anthropic for alleged unauthorized use of copyrighted content in training AI

Anthropic, a company specializing in Generative AI, is facing a legal challenge as three writers have initiated a collective legal action in a federal court based in California. Their claim is that the company illicitly employed their copyrighted materials to educate its chatbot, Claude, which operates based on AI algorithms.

The legal document, submitted earlier this week, asserts that Anthropic utilized unauthorized copies of literary works belonging to authors such as Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, among numerous others, for advancing its AI models without obtaining the necessary permissions or providing compensation.

This litigation represents the most recent instance in a progression of notable lawsuits initiated by copyright owners against AI enterprises for leveraging protected content like essays, books, and artworks to cultivate generative AI applications. This particular case is reminiscent of earlier legal battles against industry leaders such as OpenAI and Meta, where writers have alleged that their intellectual property was exploited for enriching extensive language models without their consent.

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AndyC

Andy Curtis is an award-winning security consultant, researcher and public speaker. He has been working in the computer security industry since the early 1990s, having been employed by state and federal government, leading healthcare and banking providers across three continents. He has given talks about computer security for some of the world’s largest companies, worked with law enforcement agencies on investigations into hacking groups, and is a regular voice on TV and radio explaining IT security threats.

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