Anthropic agrees to shell out a staggering $1.5 billion to settle a legal dispute with authors in the US court

In a landmark decision, Anthropic, a leading AI research company backed by Amazon and Alphabet, has agreed to pay a settlement of $1.5 billion to a group of authors in a class-action lawsuit. The lawsuit, filed last year by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, accused Anthropic of using their books without permission to train its AI chatbot platform, Claude.

The pivotal question of fair use in AI copyright cases is still under debate, with Judge Alsup's ruling on this matter still being debated in other cases. However, in this instance, Anthropic was found to have made fair use of the authors' work to train Claude, but violated their rights by saving more than 7 million pirated books in a central library.

This settlement is the first in a series of lawsuits against tech companies like OpenAI, Microsoft, and Meta Platforms over the use of copyrighted material for training generative AI systems. If approved, the settlement will be the largest publicly reported copyright recovery in history, surpassing any other copyright class action settlement or individual copyright case litigated to final judgment.

A trial was scheduled to determine the amount Anthropic owed for the alleged piracy, with potential damages ranging into the hundreds of billions of dollars. The settlement, announced in August, was kept confidential until a subsequent court filing provided the details.

The writers accused Anthropic of unlawfully using millions of pirated books to train its AI assistant Claude. Anthropic and the plaintiffs have filed a court document asking U.S. District Judge William Alsup to approve the settlement.

Other judges, in similar ongoing lawsuits against Meta and other tech companies, have ruled that using copyrighted work without permission to train AI would be unlawful in "many circumstances." The companies involved in these lawsuits argue that their systems make fair use of copyrighted material to create new, transformative content.

This development marks a significant step in the ongoing debate over the use of copyrighted material in AI training, and it is expected to set a precedent for future cases. The settlement is currently under review by Judge Alsup.

Anthropic agrees to shell out a staggering $1.5 billion to settle a legal dispute with authors in the US court