Group of Writers File Lawsuit Against Anthropic for Alleged Use of Pirated Books in AI Training

TapTechNews August 21, it was reported by Reuters that a group of writers filed a lawsuit against the artificial intelligence company Anthropic, alleging that the company used pirated books to train its AI model.

It was reported that this class action lawsuit was filed in a California state court on Monday. The plaintiffs claim that Anthropic built a multi-billion-dollar business by stealing hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books.

The authors stated in the lawsuit that Anthropic used a large open-source data set The Pile to train its Claude series of AI chatbots. This data set contains a part called Books3, which is a huge pirated e-book library, including works by Stephen King, Michael Pollan, and thousands of other authors. Earlier this month, Anthropic confirmed to Vox that it used The Pile to train Claude.

It is obvious that Anthropic downloaded and copied copies of The Pile and Books3, knowing that these data sets contain a large amount of copyrighted content from pirated websites such as Bibiliotik, the lawsuit reads. The authors hope the court will approve their class action lawsuit and require Anthropic to pay the proposed damages and prohibit the company from using copyrighted materials in the future.

TapTechNews noted that last year former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee and other authors filed a similar lawsuit against Meta, Microsoft, and EleutherAI (the non-profit organization behind The Pile), alleging that they misappropriated works to train AI models. George R.R. Martin, Jodi Picoult, Michael Chabon, and several other authors also sued the company for OpenAI's alleged use of their copyrighted content.