Anthropic agrees to $1.5B copyright settlement – Mobile World Live
AI player Anthropic reportedly agreed to pay a group of authors $1.5 billion for downloading pirated books to train its Claude AI chatbot as part of a copyright lawsuit filed last year.
Various news agencies reported the proposed settlement is one of the largest to date over the use of intellectual property to train large language models.
In 2024, a trio of authors and journalists filed a class-action lawsuit against AI start-up Anthropic for allegedly using hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books to train its Claude chatbots.
The lawsuit filed in a California court stated the AI company “intentionally downloaded known pirated copies of books from the internet.”
It also stated Anthropic made unlicensed copies of the books, which were used to “digest and analyse the copyrighted expression”.
CBS reported Anthropic will pay about $3,000 per book of the estimated 500,000 books covered by the settlement. The AI company will also pay interest while agreeing to destroy the datasets containing the allegedly pirated material.
The news agency explained a US district judge in the state of California will review the settlement terms tomorrow (8 September) before they are finalised.
A lawyer for the plaintiffs told Bloomberg the settlement is a landmark decision and that “taking copyrighted works from these pirate websites is wrong”.
Industry warning
The settlement could serve as a warning to other AI players such as OpenAI and Microsoft, which are also facing lawsuits over using published material to train their models.
The settlement follows a June ruling by the judge which stated the “use of the books at issue to train Claude and its precursors was exceedingly transformative and was a fair use under” the Copy Right Act, according to a filing.
“Today’s settlement, if approved, will resolve the plaintiffs’ remaining legacy claims. We remain committed to developing safe AI systems that help people and organisations extend their capabilities, advance scientific discovery, and solve complex problems,” a representative for Anthropic told Mobile World Live (MWL) on 5 August.
The representative told MWL the June ruling found “Anthropic’s approach to training AI models constitutes fair use”.
Bloomberg noted Anthropic could have faced an even larger settlement if it went to trial in December.
Earlier this month, Anthropic secured $13 billion in funding for a valuation of $183 billion, which it claimed marked it as one of the fastest-growing technology companies in history.
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