The California federal court has recently seen a class-action lawsuit filed against Anthropic, an artificial intelligence startup backed by Amazon, over alleged copyright infringement. Three authors, Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, claimed that Anthropic has built a multibillion-dollar business by stealing hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books, including their own works.
The lawsuit accuses Anthropic of downloading known pirated versions of the plaintiffs' works, making copies of them, and feeding them into its AI models. This comes in the wake of Anthropic's launch of its most powerful AI model, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, earlier this year. The lawsuit states that copyright law prohibits the actions taken by Anthropic in using pirated and illegal copies of copyrighted works.
This is not the first legal challenge that Anthropic has faced in relation to copyright infringement. Last October, Universal Music sued the startup over alleged infringement of copyrighted song lyrics, with other music publishers joining the lawsuit as well. The lawsuit mentioned examples such as the AI chatbot Claude generating almost identical copies of lyrics to songs like "Roar" by Katy Perry and "I Will Survive" by Gloria Gaynor.
The news industry, facing challenges in maintaining revenue streams, is also grappling with the impact of AI-generated content on copyright laws. Several news organizations, including The New York Times and The Chicago Tribune, have filed lawsuits against AI companies like OpenAI and Microsoft over alleged copyright infringements related to their journalistic content appearing in AI training data.
While some news organizations are choosing to fight against AI companies over copyright issues, others are partnering with them to display content or enhance their products. OpenAI has announced partnerships with publishers like Condé Nast, Time magazine, News Corp., and Reddit to access current and archived articles for use in their AI models. Perplexity AI has also introduced a revenue-sharing model for publishers following plagiarism accusations.