Artificial intelligence company Anthropic has been hit with a class-action lawsuit in California federal court by three authors who say it misused their books and hundreds of thousands of others to train its AI-powered chatbot Claude.

The complaint, filed on Monday by writers and journalists Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson, said that Anthropic used pirated versions of their works and others to teach Claude to respond to human prompts.

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.

The lawsuit joins several other high-stakes complaints filed by copyright holders including visual artists, news outlets and record labels over the material used by tech companies to train their generative artificial intelligence systems.

Separate groups of authors have sued OpenAI and Meta Platforms over the companies’ alleged misuse of their work to train the large-language models underlying their chatbots.

The case filed Monday is the second against Anthropic following a lawsuit brought by music publishers last year over its alleged misuse of copyrighted song lyrics to train Claude.

The authors said in their complaint that Anthropic has “built a multibillion-dollar business by stealing hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books.” Anthropic has drawn financial backing from sources including Amazon, Google and former cryptocurrency billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried.

According to the complaint, the authors’ works were included in a dataset of pirated books that Anthropic used to train Claude.

The lawsuit requested an unspecified amount of monetary damages and an order permanently blocking Anthropic from misusing the authors’ work.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

San Francisco:

Anthropic on Monday announced that its artificial intelligence assistant “Claude” is available in Europe after launching in the United States earlier this year.

“We’re excited to announce that Claude, Anthropic’s trusted AI assistant, is now available for people and businesses across Europe to enhance their productivity and creativity,” the San Francisco-based tech startup said in a blog post.

Claude can be accessed for free in Europe online at claude.ai or using an app tailored for Apple mobile devices, according to Anthropic.

It is also available to businesses through a paid “Claude Team” subscription plan, the company added.

The OpenAI rival introduced the latest version of Claude in March.

“Claude has strong levels of comprehension and fluency in French, German, Spanish, Italian, and other European languages, allowing users to converse with Claude in multiple languages,” Anthropic said.

“Claude’s intuitive, user-friendly interface makes it easy for anyone to seamlessly integrate our advanced AI models into their workflows.”

OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 sparked keen interest in generative AI that enables computers to create images, videos, computer code, or written works from simple text prompts.

Founded by former OpenAI employees, Anthropic strives to distinguish itself from its competitors by building stricter safeguards into its technology to prevent it from being misused.

Millions of people are already using Claude for an array of purposes, according to Anthropic co-founder and chief executive Dario Amodei. “I can’t wait to see what European people and companies will be able to create with Claude,” Amodei said.

An application programming interface for developers interested in using Anthropic AI has been accessible in Europe since the start of this year, according to the company.

Anthropic has raised at least $7 billion in funding since 2021, with its backers including Amazon, Google, and Salesforce.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)