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 (Aug 19) 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.

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