Anthropic, the AI company behind the chatbot Claude, has agreed to a landmark $1.5 billion settlement to resolve a class-action lawsuit filed by authors who allege their copyrighted books were used without permission to train the company's AI models. This settlement, pending approval by U.S. District Judge William Alsup, would represent the largest publicly reported copyright recovery in U.S. history. Under the terms, authors are set to receive approximately $3,000 per book, covering about 465,000 works allegedly sourced from pirated databases like Library Genesis and Pirate Mirror Library
The lawsuit, initiated in August 2024 by authors including Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, accused Anthropic of downloading and storing millions of pirated books to train its AI systems. While a previous ruling found that training AI models on legally obtained copyrighted material could be considered "fair use," it allowed claims regarding the unauthorized acquisition and storage of content to proceed
As part of the settlement, Anthropic has agreed to destroy its copies of the pirated books and has committed to obtaining training data through legal means in the future
. However, Judge Alsup expressed concerns over the transparency of the settlement process and the potential for undisclosed claims, requesting more detailed information before proceeding
This case underscores the growing legal scrutiny faced by AI companies over the use of copyrighted materials in training models and may set a precedent for future litigation in the field.