A class-action lawsuit has been filed against Anthropic, an Amazon-backed AI company, for copyright infringement.

• On Monday, a class-action lawsuit was filed against Anthropic, an Amazon-backed AI startup, in California federal court, accusing the company of copyright infringement.
• According to the filing, three authors claimed that Anthropic constructed a multibillion-dollar enterprise through the illegal acquisition of hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books, including their own.
• Anthropic, founded by ex-OpenAI research executives, has Google and Salesforce among its backers.

On Monday, Anthropic, a -backed artificial intelligence startup, was hit with a class-action lawsuit in California federal court over allegations of copyright infringement. The lawsuit was filed by three authors who claimed that Anthropic built a multibillion-dollar business by stealing hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books, including their own.

Anthropic, founded by ex-OpenAI research executives, has Salesforce among its backers.

The lawsuit by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson claimed that Anthropic's business model relies on the large-scale theft of copyrighted works, specifically its flagship "Claude" family of large language models. The lawsuit also alleged that Anthropic downloaded known pirated versions of the plaintiffs' works, made copies of them, and fed these pirated copies into its models.

Anthropic's June release of its latest powerful AI model, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, has led to a lawsuit. Like OpenAI's ChatGPT and 's Gemini, Claude has gained immense popularity in the past year.

The lawsuit alleges that Anthropic's actions of downloading and copying hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books from pirated and illegal websites violate copyright law.

Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In addition to the current lawsuit, Universal Music filed a suit against Anthropic in October 2020, accusing the startup of infringing on their copyrighted song lyrics. Other music publishers, including Concord and ABKCO, were also included as plaintiffs.

Anthropic's AI chatbot Claude was found to have violated the rights of Concord, the copyright owner, by generating an "almost identical copy of the lyrics" to the song "Roar" by Katy Perry. Additionally, the lawsuit named Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive" as an example of Anthropic's alleged copyright infringement, as Universal owns the rights to its lyrics.

"Anthropic is accused of illegally copying and distributing large amounts of copyrighted material while developing and operating AI models, just like how other technology developers have done in the past, such as the printing press, copy machine, and web-crawler, they must adhere to the law."

As AI-generated content becomes more common, many news publications and media outlets are intensely focusing on safeguarding their businesses due to the industry's ongoing struggle to generate sufficient revenue from advertising and subscriptions to cover the high costs of news gathering.

In June, the Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit newsroom established in the United States, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and its primary funder, Microsoft, in federal court, accusing them of copyright infringement. This legal action followed similar suits brought by other publications, including The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, and The New York Daily News.

In December, Microsoft and OpenAI were sued by The New York Times for intellectual property violations related to the use of its journalistic content in ChatGPT training data. The Times claimed it seeks to hold the two companies accountable for "billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages" related to the "unlawful copying and use of the Times's uniquely valuable works," according to a filing in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. OpenAI disagreed with the Times' characterization of events.

In April, the Chicago Tribune and eight other newspapers filed a lawsuit.

In 2021, a group of notable American authors, including Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham, George R.R. Martin, and Jodi Picoult, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing the company of copyright infringement for using their work to train ChatGPT.

Some news organizations are collaborating with AI startups rather than preparing for a confrontation.

On Tuesday, Condé Nast and OpenAI announced a partnership where ChatGPT and SearchGPT will showcase content from Vogue, The New Yorker, Condé Nast Traveler, GQ, Architectural Digest, Vanity Fair, Wired, and other publications.

In July, Perplexity AI introduced a revenue-sharing model for publishers after more than a month of plagiarism allegations. The first to join the company's "Publishers Program" were media outlets and content platforms such as Fortune, Time, Entrepreneur, The Texas Tribune, Der Spiegel, and WordPress.com.

In June, OpenAI and Time magazine announced a "multi-year content deal" that will enable OpenAI to access and display Time's content within its ChatGPT chatbot. This will allow OpenAI to use Time's content to enhance its products, likely by training its AI models.

In May, OpenAI formed a partnership with News Corp. to access current and archived articles from various publications, including The Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch, Barron's, and the New York Post. Additionally, Reddit announced in May that it would partner with OpenAI to train its AI models on Reddit content.