Artificial intelligence company Anthropic faces a class-action lawsuit in a California federal court filed by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, according to Reuters. The lawsuit alleges that the company included the authors’ books in a dataset of pirated books to train its AI chatbot, Claude. Anthropic is backed by tech giants such as Amazon (AMZN), Google (GOOGL), and former cryptocurrency billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried.
Furthermore, the lawsuit seeks an “unspecified amount” in monetary damages and an order to permanently block Anthropic from misusing the authors’ work.
AI Companies Are Increasingly Facing Lawsuits
This lawsuit adds to a series of similar complaints from copyright holders, including visual artists, news outlets, and record labels, against tech companies. It is the second case against Anthropic, following a lawsuit filed last year by music publishers over the misuse of song lyrics, protected by copyright law, to train Claude.
Moreover, many authors, including John Grisham, sued OpenAI and Meta Platforms (META) last year over AI training practices.
Tussle Between Authors and AI Companies
Discontent is rising among authors, music publishers, and artists as AI companies frequently use their works to train large language models (LLMs). Last year, the Authors Guild alleged that OpenAI, backed by Microsoft (MSFT), was training its LLM model with data from illegal online “pirate” book repositories. This led to OpenAI’s ChatGPT generating accurate summaries of these works. Authors are also concerned that AI could replace them by producing low-quality ebooks that mimic human-authored books.
In response, OpenAI and other AI companies argue that using data scraped from the internet for training their LLMs qualifies as fair use under U.S. copyright law.
What Is the Prediction for Amazon Stock?
Analysts remain bullish about AMZN stock, with a Strong Buy consensus rating based on 41 Buys and one Hold. Over the past year, AMZN has surged by more than 30%, and the average AMZN price target of $223.58 implies an upside potential of 25% from current levels.
