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Anthropic’s $1.5 billion author settlement gets court approval
A federal judge approved Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement with authors who sued over pirated books used to train Claude.
Image: Engadget
A federal judge in San Francisco has approved Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement in the copyright case brought by writers who accused the company of using pirated books to train Claude.
The authors sued Anthropic in 2024, alleging that the company used pirated copies of their work to train its large language models. In an earlier ruling, original judge William Alsup said Anthropic’s use of the writers' work for training counted as fair use. But he also found that the company infringed copyright by storing 7 million pirated books in a central library.
Alsup rejected the proposed deal in September last year, saying it was forcing terms “down the throat of authors” and was “nowhere close to complete.” Since then, Anthropic has launched a settlement website that includes a list of affected works so authors can confirm whether they are eligible to file a claim.
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The settlement covers more than 480,000 works. US District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin, who took over the case after Alsup retired, has now signed off on the terms. Under the agreement, authors are expected to receive about $3,000 per affected work, and Anthropic must destroy the pirated copies of their books.
Some plaintiffs still viewed the payout as too low and chose to opt out, opening the door to separate lawsuits against Anthropic.
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Ava covers the rapidly evolving world of artificial intelligence, from foundational models and research labs to the real-world economics of intelligence. With a background in computational linguistics, she cuts through the hype to find out what actually works. She firmly believes that benchmarks are just marketing until reproduced in the wild.
via Engadget
