Generative AI firm, Anthropic, is embroiled in a new legal battle after three authors filed a class-action lawsuit in California federal court, accusing the company of illegally using their copyrighted works to train its AI-powered chatbot, Claude.
The complaint, filed on Monday, alleges that Anthropic used pirated versions of books by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, along with hundreds of thousands of others, to develop its AI models without proper authorization or compensation.
The lawsuit is the latest in a series of high-profile legal actions brought by copyright holders against AI companies for their use of protected materials including articles, books, paintings, etc in training generative AI systems. This case follows similar lawsuits against tech giants like OpenAI and Meta, where authors claim their works were exploited to train large language models without their consent.