Anthropic will pay at least $1.5 billion to settle a US class action lawsuit over allegedly using pirated books to train its artificial intelligence (AI) models, according to court documents filed Friday.
“This landmark settlement far surpasses any other known copyright recovery,” said plaintiffs’ attorney Justin Nelson. “It is the first of its kind in the AI era.”
The settlement stems from a class-action lawsuit filed by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, who accused Anthropic of illegally copying their books to train Claude, the company’s AI chatbot that rivals ChatGPT.
In a partial victory for Anthropic, US District Court Judge William Alsup ruled in June that the company’s training of its Claude AI models with books — whether bought or pirated — so transformed the works that it constituted “fair use” under the law.
“The technology at issue was among the most transformative many of us will see in our lifetimes,” Alsup wrote in his decision, comparing AI training to how humans learn by reading books.
