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A group of writers is suing artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, accusing it of committing large-scale theft when it trained its popular chatbot Claude using pirated books, according to foreign media reports on August 21.

While a similar lawsuit against competitor OpenAI (maker of ChatGPT) has been going on for more than a year, this is the first time writers have filed a lawsuit against Anthropic and its Claude chatbot.

The smaller San Francisco company, founded by former OpenAI leaders, positions itself as a more responsible, safety-focused developer of generative AI models that can compose emails, summarize documents and interact with people in natural ways.

But the lawsuit filed Monday in federal court in San Francisco says Anthropic’s use of pirated libraries to develop its AI products makes a mockery of its noble goals.

The lawsuit states: It is no exaggeration to say that Anthropic’s model seeks to profit by mining the human expression and originality behind each work.

Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Monday.

The lawsuit was filed by three writers — Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson — who sought to represent a group of similarly situated fiction and nonfiction writers.

While this is the first time a book author has sued Anthropic, the company has also faced lawsuits from major music publishers who accused Crowder of plagiarizing lyrics from copyrighted songs.

The authors’ case joins a growing number of lawsuits filed in San Francisco and New York against developers of large language models for artificial intelligence.

OpenAI and its business partner Microsoft are battling a slew of copyright infringement cases led by household names like John Grisham, Jodi Picoult and “Game of Thrones” novelist George R. R. Martin, as well as a string of lawsuits from media outlets including The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and Mother Jones.

The common thread in these cases is that tech companies have stolen a lot of human works and trained AI chatbots to create human-like texts without obtaining permission or paying the original authors. Legal challenges have come not only from writers, but also from visual artists, record labels and other creators who claim that the profits of AI are based on misappropriation.

Anthropic and other tech companies have argued that the training of AI models falls within the fair use doctrine of U.S. law, which allows limited use of copyrighted material, such as for teaching, research or transforming a copyrighted work into something else.

But the lawsuit against Anthropic alleges that it used a dataset called The Pile, which contains a large number of pirated books, and questions the claim that the AI ​​system learns in the same way that humans do.

The lawsuit states: People who learn through books purchase legitimate copies of books or borrow books from libraries where they are purchased, thereby providing at least some level of compensation to authors and creators.