New Delhi: Anthropic has landed in fresh legal trouble after over 100 authors sued it for using pirated books to train its AI models. The authors have demanded more than $75 million in damages from the firm, reported New York Post.
According to the lawsuit, filed in Northern California District Court on 17 June, Anthropic sourced millions of pirated copies of books from illegal websites Pirate Library Mirror and Library Genesis. It accessed these sites using BitTorrent and then uploaded the work of authors, without their knowledge, to its “vast central library”. The pirate material was then allegedly used to train Anthropic’s AI models.
The filing, accessed by New York Post, says that the affected writers have demanded $150,000 per pirate piece from the company.
Anthropic allegedly used over 500 pirated books for its AI models, which include Tiffany Aliche’s New York Times bestseller Get Good with Money and Mexican author Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate, which is an international bestseller.
The authors who have accused Anthropic of stealing their works include Academy Award-nominated JFK screenwriter Zachary Sklar, Nolan Bushnell, and Newbery Medal winner Donna Barba Higuera.
“Anthropic built the future of artificial intelligence on the books of authors — past, present, and living,” James Bartolemei, the lead lawyer representing the authors, told The Post.
“My clients ask a simple question: is that innovation, or is it theft with better marketing? Let a jury decide,” he added.
Also read: Masked thieves steal jewellery worth €4 million from French museum
A $1.5-billion settlement
Last September, Anthropic had settled a copyright infringement lawsuit brought against it by authors, who claimed that the firm used millions of digital copies of books to train its large language models that power its chatbot Claude.
“Rather than obtaining permission and paying a fair price for the creations it exploits, Anthropic pirated them,” the authors had said in their complaint, according to NPR.
Anthropic later agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle the lawsuit — about $3,000 for each of the 500,000 books that it allegedly pirated.
Besides the payment, Anthropic had also agreed to destroy the pirated copies of books it accessed.
“While the settlement amount is very significant and represents a clear victory for the publishers and authors in the class, it also proves what we have been saying all along— that AI companies can afford to compensate copyright owners for their works without it undermining their ability to continue to innovate and compete,” Keith Kupferschmid, president and CEO of the Copyright Alliance, had told NPR.