A US federal judge has approved Anthropic’s $1.5B settlement with authors and book publishers who sued the AI company over copyright infringement, allowing payments to begin.
The settlement will provide $3,000 per work across an estimated 500,000 copyrighted works, with funds shared among the authors and publishers that hold the rights, according to the announcement. It is believed to be the largest settlement in US copyright law history.
The case followed a ruling that Anthropic had illegally downloaded and stored millions of copyrighted books. The company built its training library using books it purchased and scanned, as well as books downloaded from pirate websites. The court found the latter method illegal.
The judge also ruled that training an AI model on copyrighted text can qualify as fair use. However, that decision came from a single district court and will not become binding precedent because Anthropic settled before the case could reach an appeals court.
The approval closes the case but leaves broader questions around AI training and copyright unresolved. Similar lawsuits remain active against companies including Google, Meta, Midjourney and OpenAI. A group of publishers and authors also recently sued Google, alleging that copyrighted works were used to train its Gemini AI platform.
Source: TechCrunch
