Anthropic, the Amazon-backed artificial intelligence startup, on Monday was hit with a class-action lawsuit in California federal court over alleged copyright infringement. Three authors said in the filing that Anthropic “built a multibillion-dollar business by stealing hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books,” including their own.
Anthropic, which was founded by ex-OpenAI research executives, has backers including Google and Salesforce.
Authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson alleged in the lawsuit that “an essential component of Anthropic’s business model — and its flagship ‘Claude’ family of large language models (or ‘LLMs’)— is the largescale theft of copyrighted works,” later alleging that “Anthropic downloaded known pirated versions of Plaintiffs’ works, made copies of them, and fed these pirated copies into its models.”
The lawsuit follows Anthropic’s June debut of its most powerful AI model yet, Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Claude is one of the chatbots that, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google‘s Gemini, has exploded in popularity in the past year.
“Copyright law prohibits what Anthropic has done here: downloading and copying hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books taken from pirated and illegal websites,” the lawsuit states.
Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
This week’s case also follows another lawsuit brought against Anthropic last October, in which Universal Music sued the startup over “systematic and widespread infringement of their copyrighted song lyrics,” per a filing in a Tennessee federal court. Other music publishers, such as Concord and ABKCO, were also named as plaintiffs.
One example from Universal Music’s lawsuit: When a user asked Anthropic’s AI chatbot Claude about the lyrics to the song “Roar” by Katy Perry, it generated an “almost identical copy of those lyrics,” violating the rights of Concord, the copyright owner, per the filing. The lawsuit also named Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” as an example of Anthropic’s alleged copyright infringement, as Universal owns the rights to its lyrics.
“In the process of building and operating AI models, Anthropic unlawfully copies and disseminates vast amounts of copyrighted works,” the lawsuit stated, later adding, “Just like the developers of other technologies that have come before, from the printing press to the copy machine to the web-crawler, AI companies must follow the law.”
With the news industry broadly struggling to maintain sufficient advertising and subscription revenue to pay for its costly newsgathering operations, many news publications and media outlets are aggressively trying to protect their businesses as AI-generated content becomes more prevalent.
The Center for Investigative Reporting, the country’s oldest nonprofit newsroom, sued OpenAI and lead backer Microsoft in federal court in June for alleged copyright infringement, following similar suits from publications including The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune and The New York Daily News.
In December, The New York Times filed a suit against Microsoft and OpenAI, alleging intellectual property violations related to its journalistic content appearing in ChatGPT training data. The Times said it seeks to hold Microsoft and OpenAI accountable for “billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages” related to the “unlawful copying and use of the Times’s uniquely valuable works,” according to a filing in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. OpenAI disagreed with the Times’ characterization of events.
The Chicago Tribune, along with seven other newspapers, followed with a suit in April.
Outside of news, a group of prominent U.S. authors, including Jonathan Franzen, John Grisham, George R.R. Martin and Jodi Picoult, sued OpenAI last year, alleging copyright infringement in using their work to train ChatGPT.
But not all news organizations are gearing up for a fight, and some are instead joining forces with AI startups.
On Tuesday, OpenAI announced a partnership with Condé Nast, in which ChatGPT and SearchGPT will display content from Vogue, The New Yorker, Condé Nast Traveler, GQ, Architectural Digest, Vanity Fair, Wired, Bon Appétit and other outlets.
In July, Perplexity AI debuted a revenue-sharing model for publishers following more than a month of plagiarism accusations. Media outlets and content platforms including Fortune, Time, Entrepreneur, The Texas Tribune, Der Spiegel and WordPress.com were the first to join the company’s “Publishers Program.”
OpenAI and Time magazine announced a “multi-year content deal” in June that will allow OpenAI to access current and archived articles from more than 100 years of Time’s history. OpenAI will be able to display Time’s content within its ChatGPT chatbot in response to user questions, according to a press release, and to use Time’s content “to enhance its products,” or, likely, to train its AI models.
OpenAI announced a similar partnership in May with News Corp., allowing OpenAI to access current and archived articles from The Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch, Barron’s, the New York Post and other publications. Reddit also announced in May that it will partner with OpenAI, allowing the company to train its AI models on Reddit content.
U.S. President Donald Trump gestures as he hosts a Rose Garden Club lunch at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., October 21, 2025.
Kevin Lamarque | Reuters
President Donald Trump said in a post on Thursday that the National Guard was preparing to “surge” San Francisco, but he was swayed by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Salesforce Marc Benioff and others to hold off on the deployment.
Trump said in a post on Truth Social that he also spoke with Democratic Mayor Daniel Lurie, who “was making substantial progress” on crime.
“Great people like Jensen Huang, Marc Benioff, and others have called saying that the future of San Francisco is great,” Trump wrote.
The reversal marks a major political win for the city of San Francisco and Lurie, who is in his first term.
“The president told me clearly that he was calling off any plans for a federal deployment in San Francisco,” Lurie said in a statement. “Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem reaffirmed that direction in our conversation this morning.”
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Lurie, a moderate Democrat, has taken a different approach with Trump than other California officials, like Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Governor Gavin Newsom, who publicly fire back at the president’s administration. Instead, Lurie consistently does not evoke Trump by name publicly or privately.
In recent addresses on the potential for a deployment, Lurie has touted the city’s progress on business development and crime, often citing data that shows San Franciscans feel the city is on the right track.
“We have work to do, and we would welcome continued partnerships with the FBI, DEA, ATF, and U.S. Attorney to get drugs and drug dealers off our streets, but having the military and militarized immigration enforcement in our city will hinder our recovery,” Lurie said.
The potential Guard deployment became a larger flashpoint when Benioff told the New York Times that he’d support Trump’s call for federal troops to be sent to San Francisco.
His sentiments were publicly supported by Elon Musk and David Sacks, high-profile techies with close ties to the Trump administration.
On Friday, facing mounting criticism, Benioff backtracked.
“Having listened closely to my fellow San Franciscans and our local officials, and after the largest and safest Dreamforce in our history, I do not believe the National Guard is needed to address safety in San Francisco,” he posted on X.
A U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agent fires a non-lethal round at protesters as they clear a path for vehicles to enter Coast Guard Island on October 23, 2025 in Oakland, California. Federal agents have arrived in the San Francisco Bay Area for immigration operations.
Crime rates are down 30% from 2024, homicide levels hit their lowest levels in 70 years and car break-ins haven’t been at current levels in 22 years.
Meanwhile, event bookings and tourism are on the rise, residential real estate is becoming more scarce and the office market is heating up.
Business momentum in the city is largely built on the AI boom, post-pandemic. New CBRE data show venture funding in 2025 is expected to surpass the record reached in 2021, thanks in large part to AI investments in San Francisco and Silicon Valley.
US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick speaks at a business reception at Lancaster House in central London, with attendees including government ministers from both the UK and US and representatives from major UK companies, as part of the second state visit to the UK by US President Donald Trump. Picture date: Thursday Sept. 18, 2025.
Jordan Pettitt | Via Reuters
The U.S. government is not in talks with quantum computing companies to take equity stakes in the firms in exchange for federal funding, a Commerce Department official told CNBC.
“The Commerce Department is not currently negotiating equity stakes with quantum computing companies,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
The denial comes after the Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the matter, said that the Trump administration was in talks with companies including IonQ, Rigetti Computing, and D-Wave Quantum.
The Trump administration has taken recent equity stakes in companies and industries seen as vital to U.S. national security.
In August, it took a 10% stake in Intel, the nation’s leading semiconductor manufacturer. It also took a 15% stake in MP Materials, which mines rare earth elements. China has restricted exports of rare earths.
Experts say that the U.S. government’s growing interest in taking stakes in private companies is unprecedented in recent decades.
Trump administration officials such as Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick have argued that the government should benefit from a company’s success, especially where federal funds are involved.
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Quantum computing has attracted significant attention in recent years, with some of the most powerful institutions in the world spending millions in a race to develop and build the first useful and practical quantum computer, which could be completed in the next five years, according to optimistic predictions.
When there is a useful quantum computer, it would be able to do tasks that would require so much computing time on a traditional computer that it would be infeasible, such as discovering molecules that could be useful medicines or factoring large numbers.
Right now, there isn’t anything useful that quantum computers can do. The machines are purely for research.
But governments keep a close eye on the technology because it has military implications, including the potential to be able to decipher encrypted military communications.
Although the industry is attracting billions in investments, including from the federal government, it has not generated significant revenue yet.
Quantum computing companies generated under $750 million in revenue in 2024, according to a McKinsey report.
On Wednesday, Google claimed a quantum breakthrough in which it conducted research that showed that a quantum computer can run an algorithm over 13,000 times faster than a traditional computer, and that it could be verified by a second quantum computer, an advancement over past research.
Super Micro Computer shares fell 6% on Thursday after the company released weak preliminary results for its fiscal first quarter of 2026.
The server maker said it expects to report $5 billion in revenue for the quarter, down from the $6 billion to $7 billion guidance that the company had previously issued.
Super Micro said “design win upgrades” pushed some expected first-quarter revenue to the second quarter.
“We see customer demand accelerating, and we are gaining AI share, reiterating revenue of at least $33B for FY 2026 with the expectation of delivering more.” Super Micro CEO Charles Liang said in a statement.
Super Micro said it has had “recent design wins” of more than $12 billion, and that delivery has been requested during its fiscal second quarter.
The company will provide further updates on its expected second-quarter deliveries and revenues during its earnings call on Nov. 4, when it will officially report its first-quarter results.