The authors’ class action is against AI Anthropic for copyright infringement

Artificial intelligence company Anthropic has been hit with a class-action lawsuit in California federal court by three authors who say they misused its books and hundreds of thousands of others to train its AI-powered chatbot Claude .

The complaint, filed Monday by writers and journalists Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson, said Anthropic used pirated versions of their work and others to teach Claude to respond to human requests.

An Anthropic spokesman said Tuesday that the company was aware of the lawsuit and was evaluating the complaint, but declined to comment further, citing ongoing litigation. A lawyer for the authors declined to comment.

The lawsuit joins several other high-stakes complaints filed by copyright holders, including artists, news outlets and record labels, over material used by tech companies to train their generative artificial intelligence systems.

Separate groups of authors have sued OpenAI and Meta Platforms for the companies’ alleged misuse of their work to train the large language models that underlie their chatbots.

The case filed Monday is the second against Anthropic following a lawsuit filed by music publishers last year for allegedly misusing copyrighted song lyrics to train Claude.

The authors said in their complaint that Anthropic “built a multi-billion dollar business by stealing hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books.” Anthropic has received financial backing from sources such as Amazon AMZN.O, Google GOOGL.O and former cryptocurrency billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried.

According to the complaint, the authors’ work was included in a dataset of pirated books that Anthropic used to train Claude.

The suit sought an unspecified amount of monetary damages and an injunction to permanently block Anthropic from misusing the authors’ work.

(Reporting by Blake Brittain in Washington; Editing by Conor Humphries and Christopher Cushing)

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