More than 100 authors have filed a new lawsuit against Anthropic, seeking over million for the alleged unauthorized use of their books in training AI systems. The complaint was submitted to the federal court for the Northern District of California on June 17. The writers assert that the developer of Claude unlawfully obtained and utilized over 500 pirated copies of their works.
Details of the Allegations
The lawsuit encompasses a diverse array of literary works, including Tiffany Aliche’s Get Good with Money and Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate. Among the plaintiffs are notable figures such as Nolan Bushnell, co-founder of Atari, screenwriter Zachary Sklar, known for the film John F. Kennedy: The Dallas Tapes, and Newbery Medal winner Donna Barba Igna.
The authors are demanding 0,000 for each work they claim Anthropic used without permission. This amount aligns with the maximum statutory damages for willful copyright infringement in the United States.
Claims of Piracy and Distribution
The allegations extend beyond the training of models. The plaintiffs contend that Anthropic downloaded books via BitTorrent and employed illegal libraries, including Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. According to the lawsuit, the company then integrated these works into its own centralized library, from which data was fed into AI training systems.
This situation marks a departure from a previous class action against Anthropic, where writers accused the company of using pirated books to train Claude. That case concluded with a .5 billion settlement, under which Anthropic agreed to destroy the downloaded copies of the books in question. Each participant in that case was set to receive approximately ,000 per work.
A Shift in Legal Strategy
Now, however, the plaintiffs have opted out of the earlier class settlement and are pursuing their claims individually. Their stance is more aggressive; they assert that Anthropic not only stored and used pirated copies but also distributed them. In total, various lawsuits against the company estimate around seven million works that the authors believe may have been unlawfully utilized in the development of AI systems.
The Broader Implications for AI Development
The stakes for Anthropic are not only high due to the financial demands but also because the case raises fundamental questions surrounding generative AI. Can developers train models on copyrighted texts without the authors’ consent, especially when the works were sourced from pirated materials? Even after reaching a substantial settlement with some writers, the company may face new individual lawsuits from those seeking separate compensation.
