A group of authors has filed (PDF version) a class-action lawsuit against Anthropic, a leading artificial intelligence company, alleging copyright infringement.

The plaintiffs, which include well-known authors such as Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, claim that Anthropic trained its Claude AI chatbots on a dataset that contained pirated copies of their copyrighted works.

The lawsuit alleges that Anthropic used the “The Pile” dataset, which includes a collection of pirated ebooks known as “Books3.” The authors contend that Anthropic’s use of this pirated material constitutes copyright infringement and seeks damages and injunctive relief.

This is not the first time an AI company has faced allegations of copyright infringement. Similar lawsuits have been filed against Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI.