Artificial intelligence company Anthropic has agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit by book authors who say the company took pirated copies of their works to train its chatbot. The landmark settlement, if approved by a judge, could mark a turning point in legal battles between AI companies and the writers, visual artists, and other creative professionals who accuse them of copyright infringement, the AP reports. The company has agreed to pay authors or publishers about $3,000 for each of an estimated 500,000 books covered by the settlement. "As best as we can tell, it's the largest copyright recovery ever," said Justin Nelson, a lawyer for the authors. "It is the first of its kind in the AI era."
A trio of authors—thriller novelist Andrea Bartz and nonfiction writers Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson—sued last year and now represent a broader group of writers and publishers whose books Anthropic downloaded to train its chatbot Claude. A federal judge dealt the case a mixed ruling in June, finding that training AI chatbots on copyrighted books wasn't illegal but that Anthropic wrongfully acquired millions of books through pirate websites.
- If Anthropic had not settled, experts say losing the case after a scheduled December trial could have cost the San Francisco-based company even more money. "We were looking at a strong possibility of multiple billions of dollars, enough to potentially cripple or even put Anthropic out of business," says William Long, a legal analyst for Wolters Kluwer.
- US District Judge William Alsup of San Francisco has scheduled a Monday hearing to review the settlement terms. Anthropic said in a statement Friday that the settlement, if approved, "will resolve the plaintiffs' remaining legacy claims." Anthropic has also agreed to destroy the original book files it downloaded.
- Alsup's June ruling found that Anthropic had downloaded more than 7 million digitized books that it "knew had been pirated." It started with nearly 200,000 from an online library called Books3, assembled by AI researchers outside of OpenAI to match the vast collections on which ChatGPT was trained. Anthropic later took at least 5 million copies from the pirate website Library Genesis, or LibGen, and at least 2 million copies from the Pirate Library Mirror, Alsup wrote. Documents disclosed in court showed Anthropic employees' internal concerns about the legality of their use of pirate sites.
- Mary Rasenberger, CEO of the Authors Guild, called the settlement "an excellent result for authors, publishers, and rightsholders generally, sending a strong message to the AI industry that there are serious consequences when they pirate authors' works to train their AI, robbing those least able to afford it."
- In a separate case, Reddit is suing Anthropic for "scraping" its content without permission.
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