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. Earlier this month, Anthropic confirmed to Vox that it used The Pile to train Claude.
“It is apparent that Anthropic…