Anthropic has agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a lawsuit brought by authors and publishers over its use of millions of copyrighted books to train the models for its AI chatbot Claude, according to a legal filing posted online.
A federal judge found in June that Anthropic’s use of 7 million pirated books was protected under fair use but that holding the digital works in a “central library” violated copyright law. The judge ruled that executives at the company knew they were downloading pirated works, and a trial was scheduled for December.
The settlement, which was presented to a federal judge on Friday, still needs final approval but would pay $3,000 per book to hundreds of thousands of authors, according to the New York Times. The $1.5 billion settlement would be the largest payout in the history of U.S. copyright law, though the amount paid per work has often been higher. For example, in 2012, a woman in Minnesota paid about $9,000 per song downloaded, a figure brought down after she was initially ordered to pay over $60,000 per song.
In a statement to Gizmodo on Friday, Anthropic touted the earlier ruling from June that it was engaging in fair use by training models with millions of books.
“In June, the District Court issued a landmark ruling on AI development and copyright law, finding that Anthropic’s approach to training AI models constitutes fair use,” Aparna Sridhar, deputy general counsel at Anthropic, said in a statement by email.
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Source: Anthropic Agrees to $1.5 Billion Settlement for Downloading Pirated Books to Train AI
Just to be clear: using books to train AI was fine. Pirating the books, however, was not. Completely incredible that these guys pirated the books. With mistakes of this idiocy, I would not invest in Anthropic ever, at all.
Robin Edgar
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