In 2024, three book authors, Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson, sued Anthropic, accusing the start-up of illegally using their work to train its A.I. models. The suit is among the four dozen cases that copyright holders have brought against A.I. companies. Some have been dismissed by the courts.
Companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta and Microsoft need enormous amounts of digital data, some of which is copyrighted, to build its A.I. models. The companies have long claimed that they are in their legal right not paying for the content because the material is public and they are not reproducing the material in its entirety. But authors, publishers, musicians and other artists have challenged this stance.
The New York Times has sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, for copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. OpenAI and Microsoft have denied those claims. (One of the law firms representing the authors in their case against Anthropic is also representing The Times in its case.)
Some A.I. companies have already signed agreements with news organizations and other copyright holders to license their material. OpenAI signed licensing deals with news organizations including Axel Springer, Condé Nast, News Corp and The Washington Post. In May, Amazon signed an licensing agreement with The Times.
After The Times and several other organizations filed lawsuits over the use of copyrighted material in A.I. technologies, Anthropic tried a different approach by acquiring books “for legal reasons,” according to court documents. In early 2024, the company hired Tom Turvey, former head of the Google Books project, which created digital copies of millions of copyrighted works by scanning physical books from libraries.