Three book authors have filed a lawsuit against AI provider Anthropic PBC. The authors accused Anthropic of systematically and illegally copying copyright-protected books and then misusing them to train artificial intelligence. By doing so, the company is violating US copyright.
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Statement of Claim refers to a written statement by Anthropic employees paper from December 2021According to which 32 percent of a huge training data set consists of “Internet books,” a code word for books illegally downloaded from the Internet. The plaintiffs seek certification as a class action on behalf of all authors of books registered with the US Copyright Office that have been copied by Anthropic without a license. The list of demands includes injunctions, damages, forfeiture of enrichment, procedural costs and interest. The jury must decide.
Anthropic has not yet responded to the lawsuit. The three authors leading the suit are Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson. Their complaint is Bartz et al v. Anthropic PBC in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California (Case 3:24-cv-05417). A copyright lawsuit brought by music publishers against Anthropic has been pending in the same court since June (Ref. 3:24-cv-03811). Publishers blamed Anthropic for the massive and unauthorized use of third-party song lyrics for the training and output of a generic AI model cloud. This process is called Concord Music Group et al v. Anthropic PBC and was originally filed in the US District Court for Middle Tennessee (case 3:23-cv-01092), but has since been moved to California.
More than two dozen similar lawsuits alleging copyright infringement by AI operators are pending in the United States; Complaints are known against Alphabet, Bloomberg, Google, Meta Platform, Microsoft, Mosaic ML, Nvidia, OpenAI, Ross Intelligence, and Stability AI. The main venues are the US federal district courts for Northern California and Southern New York. Two related lawsuits do not make allegations under the US Copyright Act, but they do accuse AI operators of illegally using third-party works to train their generative AI in another way. One process involves scraping YouTube videos (Millet v. OpenAIReference 3:24-cv-04710, Northern California), the other about the alleged misuse of recordings of voice actors (Lehrman vs. LovoReference 1:24-cv-03770, Southern New York).
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