Amazon-backed Anthropic hit with class-action lawsuit over copyright infringement

Anthropic, the Amazon-backed artificial intelligence startup, on Monday was hit with a class-action lawsuit in California federal court over alleged copyright infringement. Three authors said in the filing that Anthropic "built a multibillion-dollar business by stealing hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books," including their own.

Anthropic, which was founded by ex-OpenAI research executives, has backers including Google and Salesforce.

Authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson alleged in the lawsuit that "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," later alleging that "Anthropic downloaded known pirated versions of Plaintiffs' works, made copies of them, and fed these pirated copies into its models."

The lawsuit follows Anthropic's June debut of its most powerful AI model yet, Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Claude is one of the chatbots that, like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, has exploded in popularity in the past year.

"Copyright law prohibits what Anthropic has done here: downloading and copying hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books taken from pirated and illegal websites," the lawsuit states.

Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

This week's case also follows another lawsuit brought against Anthropic last October, in which Universal Music sued the startup over "systematic and widespread infringement of their copyrighted song lyrics," per a filing in a Tennessee federal court. Other music publishers, such as Concord and ABKCO, were also named as plaintiffs.

One example from Universal Music's lawsuit: When a user asked Anthropic's AI chatbot