Syed Imran Haider 
On Monday, a class-action lawsuit was filed against Anthropic in California federal lawsuit over alleged copyright infringement.
In the filing, three authors claimed that the artificial intelligence startup had stolen hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books to set up a multi-billion dollar business.
Former research executives at OpenAI had founded Anthropic, which has some prominent backers. These include Salesforce, Google and Amazon.
The lawsuit
Kirk Wallace Johnson, Charles Graeber and Andrea Bartz were the three authors that filed the lawsuit. The alleged that largescale theft of copyrighted content is a vital part of the company’s business model.
They said that the family of large language models (LLMs) called ‘Claude’, which Anthropic uses take advantage of the pirated versions of their works.
This lawsuit comes after Anthropic launched Claude 3.5 Sonnet back in June, which is the company’s most powerful AI as yet.
Claude is Anthropic’s chatbot is similar to the Gemini ChatGPT chatbots of Google and OpenAI, respectively. It saw its popularity surge in the past year.
According to the lawsuit, copyright law does not allow Anthropic to feed pirated copies of copyrighted books to its models.
Past lawsuit
Last October, there had been another lawsuit filed against Anthropic. That lawsuit had been brought forward against the startup by Universal Music.
It had claimed that the company had infringed upon their copyrighted song lyrics. The filing had been made in a federal court in Tennessee.
The list of plaintiffs had also included other music producers, such as ABKCO and Concord. The filing shared an example of how Anthropic’s AI chatbot had copied the lyrics of the song ‘Roar’ of Katy Perry.
The lawsuit had alleged that to develop and operate its AI models, the company copies and uses large amounts of copyrighted content.
It said that just how developers of other technologies have done, AI firms like Anthropic need to follow the law.
AI Issues
There have been a great deal of problems for the news industry in general when it comes to maintaining its subscription and advertising revenue for supporting its newsgathering operations.
Therefore, it is not surprising that a number of media outlets and news publications have taken an aggressive stance to protect their businesses.
This is particularly true because AI-generated content is becoming more widespread.
In June, the oldest nonprofit newsroom in the US, The Center for Investigative Reporting, had also filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft.
This was after similar lawsuits had been filed by other publications. Such as, The New York Daily News, The Chicago Tribune and The New York Times.
The New York Times had kicked off the lawsuits against OpenAI and its backer Microsoft, as it had filed its case in December of the previous year. It had alleged violations of intellectual property.
This is because its journalistic content had appeared in the training data for ChatGPT. According to the Times, it is seeking actual and statutory damages worth billions of dollars.
The Chicago Tribune and other publications had filed their lawsuits back in April. In addition to these publications, some authors also filed lawsuits against OpenAI in the previous year.
These include Jodi Picoult, George R.R. Martin, John Grisham and Jonathan Franzen.
