Authors sue Anthropic for copyright infringement over AI training
Three authors filed a class-action lawsuit against Anthropic in California federal court alleging the company trained its Claude chatbot on pirated copies of hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books without permission or compensation. The lawsuit claims Anthropic built a multibillion-dollar business through large-scale copyright infringement of literary works.
What happened
A class-action lawsuit was filed on Monday in federal court in San Francisco by three authors—Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson—alleging that Anthropic used pirated copies of their books and hundreds of thousands of others to train its Claude chatbot.
According to the complaint, Anthropic used a dataset of pirated books to train Claude and built a multibillion-dollar business by misusing copyrighted literary works without permission or compensation.
Reported impact
The authors allege that Anthropic's actions have infringed on their copyrights and those of many other writers by using their works to develop an AI system that generates profit.
The lawsuit requests an unspecified amount of monetary damages and an order permanently blocking Anthropic from misusing the authors' work.
Index analysis
This is the first copyright infringement lawsuit filed by book authors against Anthropic, though the company is also defending against a separate music publishers' lawsuit alleging that Claude regurgitates copyrighted song lyrics.
The case joins a growing wave of copyright litigation against generative AI developers, with similar lawsuits filed against OpenAI, Meta Platforms and others by authors, artists, news outlets and music labels.
Classification
Sources and evidence
This record was researched and written by the Index, based on the following original reporting.