AI Startup Anthropic Faces Copyright Infringement Lawsuit From 3 Authors

Artificial intelligence (AI) startup Anthropic is reportedly the target of a copyright infringement lawsuit filed Tuesday (Aug. 20) in California.

Three authors allege in the lawsuit that the company built its business and its large language model (LLM) Claude through “the largescale theft of copyrighted works,” CNBC reported Tuesday.

The plaintiffs — Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson — allege that their works were among the ones downloaded from pirated and illegal websites, copied and used to build Anthropic’s AI models, according to the report.

Reached for comment by PYMNTS, an Anthropic spokesperson said in an email: “We are aware of the suit and are assessing the complaint. We cannot comment further on pending litigation.”

The report comes about 10 months after Anthropic was sued by Universal Music and two other labels that alleged that the AI firm scraped the record companies’ artists’ songs without consent and used them to create “identical or nearly identical copies of those lyrics” using the generative AI chatbot Claude.

“This copyrighted material is not free for the taking simply because it can be found on the internet,” the filing said, arguing that Anthropic had “never even attempted” to license the songs.

Anthropic is not the only AI company to face a lawsuit from authors and publishers.

OpenAI and Microsoft were sued in June by the Center for Investigative Reporting (CIR), the nonprofit news organization that produces Mother Jones and Reveal, which alleged that the companies committed copyright violations.

An OpenAI spokesperson told PYMNTS at the time: “We are working collaboratively with the news industry and partnering with global news publishers to display their content in our products like ChatGPT, including summaries, quotes and attribution, to drive traffic back to the original articles.”

OpenAI and Microsoft were also targeted with a proposed class action lawsuit filed in January. In that suit, nonfiction authors Nicholas Basbanes and Nicholas Gage alleged that the companies violated their copyrights by improperly using their works to train AI models, including the chatbot ChatGPT and other AI-based services.

AI infringement issues are escalating as companies increasingly use copyrighted materials to train sophisticated algorithms without the creators’ consent, PYMNTS reported in March. Experts say the problem underscores the need for clearer guidelines and protections in the field of AI.