Anthropic is accused of seeking to profit by exploiting the human expression and ingenuity behind the works of its authors

While similar lawsuits have been piling up against competitor OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, for over a year, this is the first lawsuit by authors against Anthropic and its chatbot “Claude.”

The smaller San Francisco-based company, founded by former OpenAI executives, has marketed itself as a more responsible and safety-focused company that develops generative AI models that can compose emails, summarize documents and interact naturally with people.

But the lawsuit, filed Monday in federal court in San Francisco, alleges that Anthropic's actions “made a mockery of its noble goals” by accessing archives full of pirated software to develop its AI product.

“It is no exaggeration to say that Anthropic's model is designed to profit from the exploitation of the human expression and ingenuity behind each of these works,” the lawsuit states.

Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday.

The lawsuit was filed by a trio of writers – Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson – who seek to represent a group of similarly situated authors of fiction and nonfiction.

This is the first lawsuit brought against Anthropic by book authors, but the company is also defending itself against a lawsuit brought by major music publishers who allege that Claude is regurgitating the lyrics of copyrighted songs.

The authors' case joins a growing number of lawsuits filed in San Francisco and New York against developers of large AI language models.

OpenAI and its business partner Microsoft are already battling a number of copyright infringement cases, led by well-known names such as John Grisham, Jodi Picoult and Game of Thrones author George RR Martin, as well as a number of lawsuits from media outlets such as The New York Times, Chicago Tribune and Mother Jones.

What ties all the cases together is the allegation that tech companies have used massive amounts of human text to train AI chatbots to produce human-like passages of text without seeking the authors' permission or compensating them. The legal challenges come not only from authors, but also from visual artists, music labels and other creatives who claim that the profits from generative AI are based on misappropriation.

Anthropic and other technology companies argue that training AI models fits the “fair use” doctrine of U.S. law, which allows limited use of copyrighted materials, such as for teaching and research purposes or converting the copyrighted work into something else.

However, the lawsuit against Anthropic accuses the company of using a dataset called “The Pile,” which contains a wealth of pirated books, and challenges the idea that AI systems learn in the same way as humans.

“People who learn from books buy legitimate copies of them or borrow them from libraries that purchase them, thereby providing at least some level of compensation to the authors and creators,” the lawsuit states.