AI hallucination at center of Anthropic copyright lawsuit

Anthropic, the AI company behind the Claude chatbot, has been ordered by a federal judge to respond to allegations that it submitted fabricated material —possibly generated by AI—as part of its defense in an ongoing copyright lawsuit.

The lawsuit, filed in October 2023 by music publishers Universal Music Group, Concord, and ABKCO, accuses Anthropic of unlawfully using lyrics from over 500 songs to train its chatbot . The publishers argue that Claude can produce copyrighted material when prompted, such as lyrics from Don McLean’s American Pie .

During a court hearing on Tuesday in California, the publishers’ attorney claimed that an Anthropic data scientist cited a nonexistent academic article from The American Statistician journal to support the argument that Claude rarely outputs copyrighted lyrics.

One of the article’s alleged authors later confirmed the paper was a ‘complete fabrication.’ The judge is now requiring Anthropic to formally address the incident in court.

The company, founded in 2021, is backed by major investors including Amazon, Google, and Sam Bankman-Fried , the disgraced crypto executive convicted of fraud in 2023.

The case marks a significant test of how AI companies handle copyrighted content, and how courts respond when AI-generated material is used in legal proceedings.

Would you like to learn more about AI, tech and digital diplomacy? If so, ask our Diplo chatbot !