A group of authors has sued Anthropic, accusing it of training its models on pirated books, as reported by Reuters. The proposed class action lawsuit was filed in a California court on Monday and alleges Anthropic “built a multibillion-dollar business by stealing hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books.”

In the lawsuit, the authors say that Anthropic used a sprawling, open-source dataset known as “The Pile” to train its family of Claude AI chatbots. Within this dataset is something called Books3, a massive library of pirated ebooks that includes works from Stephen King, Michael Pollan, and thousands of other authors.

“It is apparent that Anthropic downloaded and reproduced copies of The Pile and Books3, knowing that these datasets were comprised of a trove of copyrighted content sourced from pirate websites like Bibiliotik,” the lawsuit reads. The authors want the court to certify their class action lawsuit as well as require Anthropic to pay proposed damages and prevent the company from using copyrighted material in the future.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2024/8/20/24224450/anthropic-copyright-lawsuit-pirated-books-ai