“The author plaintiffs suing Anthropic claim the company ‘has cloaked itself in the rhetoric of ‘AI safety’ and ‘responsibility’ when in actuality its ‘actions have made a mockery of its lofty goals.’”
Journalists and book authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson have filed suit against generative artificial intelligence (AI) company, Anthropic, on behalf of a class of plaintiffs in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California – San Francisco Division, alleging widespread copyright infringement of “hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books.”
Anthropic’s core product is the AI ChatBot, Claude, which the complaint claims was fed “known pirated versions of Plaintiffs’ works” in order to train the Chatbot to generate human-like responses. “An essential component of Anthropic’s business model—and its flagship ‘Claude’ family of large language models (or “LLMs”)—is the largescale theft of copyrighted works,” said the complaint.
Far from compensating the plaintiffs for their works, Anthropic “has taken multiple steps to hide the full extent of its copyright theft,” it continued.
According to reports cited in the complaint, Anthropic “has raised $7.6 billion from tech giants like Amazon and Google” and, as of December 2023, the company was valued in excess of $18 billion. The company has become particularly popular with corporate clients, including Slack, Zoominfo, Asama, Bridgewater, LexisNexis, and Jane Street Capital, according to the lawsuit.
The infringement allegations stem chiefly from Anthropic’s admission in a December 2021 paper that it created a training dataset relying mostly on “The Pile,” which is “an 800 GB+ open-source dataset created for large language model training,” according to the complaint. One of the architects of the Pile, Shawn Presser, created a dataset called “Books3” in the Pile, which, according to the plaintiffs, is “a trove of pirated books.” Books3 consists of “all of Bibliotik,” according to public posts by Presser, and Bibliotik, according to sources cited in the complaint, is a “notorious pirated collection” of “pirated books.”
In October 2023, music publishing companies Universal Music, ABKCO and Concord also filed suit in a Tennessee district court against Anthropic, alleging “widespread infringement of their copyrighted song lyrics.” Claude can also be used to generate song lyrics to popular songs owned by the publishers or to generate “original” song lyrics in response to “requests to write a song about a certain topic, provide chord progressions for a given musical composition, or write poetry or short fiction in the style of a certain artist or songwriter,” for example, according to the complaint. These outputs also copy the publishers’ lyrics because Claude is trained on the infringing works and does not license the copyrights to those works, like other music lyric aggregators, said the publishers.
In response to that suit, Anthropic told the Tennessee court that the publishers’ “attack on this new category of digital tools misconceives the technology and the law alike.” It added that it already has “guardrails in place to try to prevent that result” and that any results that include copyrighted materials are a “bug not a feature” of the product.
But in their complaint filed yesterday, the author plaintiffs suing Anthropic claim the company “has cloaked itself in the rhetoric of ‘AI safety’ and ‘responsibility’” when in actuality its “actions have made a mockery of its lofty goals.”
The suit is seeking statutory or compensatory damages, an injunction against the infringing activity and attorney’s fees, among other relief.
Attorneys from Susman Godfrey and Lieff Cabraser filed the lawsuit on behalf of the plaintiffs.
Image Source: Deposit Photos
Author: rafapress
Image ID: 649477252
