SAN FRANCISCO: Anthropic will pay at least $1.5 billion to settle a US class action lawsuit over its alleged use of pirated books to train its artificial intelligence models.
Plaintiffs’ attorney Justin Nelson described the settlement as a landmark recovery that far surpasses any other known copyright case in the AI era.
The lawsuit was originally filed by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, who accused the company of illegally copying their books to train its Claude chatbot.
US District Court Judge William Alsup ruled in June that training AI models with books constituted fair use because it transformed the works significantly.
However, he rejected Anthropic’s argument that downloading millions of pirated books to create a permanent digital library was protected under fair use provisions.
Anthropic deputy general counsel Aparna Sridhar stated the company remains committed to developing safe AI systems that help people and advance scientific discovery.
The settlement covers approximately 500,000 books, translating to roughly $3,000 per work, which is four times the minimum statutory damages under US copyright law.
Anthropic will destroy the original pirated files and any copies, though it retains rights to books it legally purchased and scanned.
Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger said the settlement sends a strong message to the AI industry about the consequences of pirating authors’ works.
The agreement requires judicial approval and comes amid growing legal pressure on AI companies over their training practices.
Multiple lawsuits against firms including OpenAI and Meta remain pending, with rightsholders arguing that scraping copyrighted content without permission violates intellectual property law.
Anthropic recently raised $13 billion in a funding round that values the AI startup at $183 billion.
The company will use the capital to expand capacity, deepen safety research, and support international expansion.
Anthropic competes with generative AI offerings from Google, OpenAI, Meta, and Microsoft in a rapidly growing market.
Heavily backed by Amazon, Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI executives and has seen rapid growth since Claude’s initial release in early 2023. – AFP