A group of authors have sued AI company Anthropic for copyright infringement over the company’s misuse of their content. 

The AI company has received a class-action lawsuit in California federal court by authors who claim the company misused their books to train its AI-powered chatbot Claude. 

Three authors are named on the case, however, they claim the intellectual property of hundreds of thousands of others has also been wrongly used. 

Writers and journalists Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson filed the complaint on Monday (19 August) and alleged that Anthropic had used pirated versions of their works and others to teach Claude to respond to human prompts. 

The authors said in their complaint that Anthropic has “built a multibillion-dollar business by stealing hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books.” 

A spokesperson for Anthropic said on Tuesday that the company was aware of the lawsuit and assessing the complaint but declined to comment further, citing pending litigation. 

An attorney for the authors declined to comment on the matter also. 

The lawsuit is one of several high-profile complaints relating to violations on copyright law from creatives and artists as well as record labels and news outlets who believe their material has been copyrighted to train generative artificial intelligence systems. 

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and Facebook’s owner Meta have also been sued by authors for using their content to build large-language models. 

Music publishers brought a separate case against Anthropic last year for using copyrighted song lyrics in the same way which publishers believed to be a misuse of the material.  

Requests made in the lawsuit include a permanent ban from Anthropic using the author’s work as well as an unspecified amount of monetary damages. 

The ban would not, however, prevent misuse of other individual’s work, or stop other AI training organisations from using the creator’s content.