Authors sue Anthropic for copyright infringement over AI training

The artificial intelligence company Anthropic has been hit with a class-action lawsuit in California federal court by three authors who say it misused their books and hundreds of thousands of others to train its AI-powered chatbot Claude, which generates texts in response to users' prompts. The complaint, filed on Monday by writers and journalists Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson, said that Anthropic used pirated versions of their works and others to teach Claude to respond to human prompts. "Anthropic styles itself as a public benefit company, designed to improve humanity. "It is no exaggeration to say that Anthropic's model seeks to profit from strip-mining the human expression and ingenuity behind each one of those works." Separate groups of authors have sued OpenAI and Meta Platforms over the companies' alleged misuse of their work to train the large-language models underlying their chatbots.