Anthropic agrees to pay 1.5 billion dollars to settle a class action lawsuit involving authors in the US court.
In a landmark decision, AI company Anthropic has agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit from a group of authors. The lawsuit, filed last year by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, accused Anthropic of using copyrighted material without permission to train its AI chatbot Claude.
The settlement, if approved, will be the largest publicly reported copyright recovery in history, surpassing any individual copyright case litigated to final judgment. This marks the first in a string of lawsuits against tech companies over the use of copyrighted material to train generative AI systems.
The proposed settlement comes after Judge William Alsup ruled in June that Anthropic made fair use of authors' work to train Claude, but found that the company violated their rights by saving more than 7 million pirated books. Judge Alsup's decision regarding Anthropic's fair use of authors' work is being debated in other AI copyright cases.
Another San Francisco judge, hearing a similar ongoing lawsuit against Meta, ruled shortly after Alsup's decision that using copyrighted work without permission to train AI would be unlawful in "many circumstances."
The potential damages in the trial against Anthropic could range into the hundreds of billions of dollars. However, with the settlement, the company avoids a lengthy and costly trial.
Anthropic, backed by Amazon and Alphabet, has argued that their systems make fair use of copyrighted material to create new, transformative content. The company has agreed to pay the settlement to resolve the lawsuit and avoid further legal proceedings.
The settlement is for Anthropic's use of millions of pirated books to teach its AI assistant Claude to respond to human prompts. The authors involved in the lawsuit have agreed to the settlement and have asked U.S. District Judge William Alsup to approve it.
The trial against Anthropic, scheduled to determine the amount of damages for the alleged piracy, has been postponed due to the settlement. The settlement is a significant step forward in the ongoing debate about the use of copyrighted material in AI training and the boundaries of fair use.
As the use of AI continues to grow, so does the need for clear guidelines on the use of copyrighted material. This settlement could set a precedent for future cases involving AI and copyright infringement.
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