Anthropic Faces Scrutiny Over Fabricated AI Citation In $75M Lawsuit

An AI expert at Anthropic, a firm backed by Amazon, has been accused of citing a fabricated academic article in a court filing. The filing was part of the company’s legal response to a $75 million lawsuit filed by Universal Music Group, Concord, ABKCO, and other major publishers. The publishers alleged that Anthropic unlawfully used lyrics from hundreds of songs, including those by Beyoncé, The Rolling Stones, and The Beach Boys, to train its Claude language model.

The citation, included in a declaration by Anthropic data scientist Olivia Chen, was intended to support the company’s argument that Claude only reproduces copyrighted lyrics under rare and specific conditions. During a hearing, the plaintiffs’ attorney, Matt Oppenheim, called the citation a “complete fabrication,” suggesting that Chen likely used Claude itself to generate the source. Anthropic’s attorney, Sy Damle, countered that the error appeared to be a mis-citation, not a fabrication, and criticized the plaintiffs for raising the issue late in the proceedings.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Susan van Keulen expressed serious concern over the issue, noting that “there’s a world of difference between a missed citation and a hallucination generated by AI.” She ordered Anthropic to formally respond to the allegation by Thursday. Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The lawsuit against Anthropic was filed in October 2023, with the plaintiffs accusing Anthropic’s Claude model of being trained on a massive volume of copyrighted lyrics and reproducing them on demand. They demanded damages, disclosure of the training set, and the destruction of infringing content. Anthropic responded in January 2024, denying that its systems were designed to output copyrighted lyrics, calling any such reproduction a “rare bug,” and accusing the publishers of offering no evidence that typical users encountered infringing content.

In August 2024, the company faced another lawsuit from authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, who accused Anthropic of training Claude on pirated versions of their books. This case is part of a growing backlash against generative AI companies accused of feeding copyrighted material into training datasets without consent. OpenAI is facing multiple lawsuits from comedian Sarah Silverman, the Authors Guild, and The New York Times, accusing the company of using copyrighted books and articles to train its GPT models without permission or licenses. Meta is also named in similar suits, with plaintiffs alleging that its LLaMA models were trained on unlicensed literary works sourced from pirated datasets.

In March, OpenAI and Google urged the Trump administration to ease copyright restrictions around AI training, calling them a barrier to innovation in their formal proposals for the upcoming U.S. “AI Action Plan.” In the UK, a government bill that would enable artificial intelligence firms to use copyright-protected work without permission hit a roadblock, after the House of Lords backed an amendment requiring AI firms to reveal what copyrighted material they have used in their models.

This legal pressure on AI developers highlights the complex issues surrounding the use of copyrighted material in training AI models. The case against Anthropic underscores the need for transparency and accountability in the development of AI technologies, as well as the potential legal consequences of relying on AI-generated content in legal proceedings. The outcome of this case could set a precedent for how AI companies handle copyrighted material and the ethical implications of using AI in legal contexts.