Anthropic closed a whopping $30 billion Series G funding round in mid-February, bringing its post-money valuation to $380 billion—a figure that has eclipsed giants like Boeing and Netflix. In just five years, it is approaching the valuation of its biggest rival in the market, OpenAI.
However, the way the company has achieved its success in the artificial intelligence sector has been brought into question. In a recent post by Anthropic on X, it pointed toward unauthorized data use by rivals in the AI industry and got brutally community-noted, with users accusing the company of hypocrisy.
The billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk also joined the party to reinforce the notion that Anthropic trained its AI model using stolen data. He also provided screenshots of past lawsuits or settlements in which the company was involved. So, without further ado, let’s unravel the entire fiasco surrounding Anthropic and alleged intellectual theft.
Elon Musk backs community in highlighting Anthropic’s alleged theft
Musk-owned X has come alive with debates about improper data sourcing and intellectual property rights as Anthropic warned about “industrial-scale distillation attacks” on its models by “DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax.”
“These labs created over 24,000 fraudulent accounts and generated over 16 million exchanges with Claude, extracting its capabilities to train and improve their own models,” the tweet further read.
However, X users were not letting Anthropic get away with such accusations, as they pointed toward the company’s own alleged complicity in training data violations. “Anthropic also trained their model using stolen data,” one X user wrote while providing receipts of lawsuits pertaining to unauthorized data usage that Anthropic was involved in. Musk retweeted the post and stated that the generative AI company stole “training data” at a “massive scale” and had to pay “multi-billion dollar settlements for their theft.”
Notably, in August 2024, a class-action lawsuit was filed by various authors alleging that Anthropic trained its Claude AI model using pirated copies of their books. The company agreed to settle the lawsuit for about $1.5 billion, providing roughly $3,000 per book to affected authors.
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In another major lawsuit filed in October 2023, several music publishing companies, including Universal Music Group, sued Anthropic for using copyrighted song lyrics to train its flagship AI model Claude, accusing it of copyright infringement.
How did the internet react to the data theft debate?
Most users brought up the alleged malpractices that many AI companies are involved in to train their models. They expressed concern that unauthorized data use is becoming the norm among generative AI firms and could become part of corporate culture.
As scrutiny grows, Elon Musk and community notes leave Anthropic grappling with uncomfortable questions over data, transparency, and trust.
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