Judge approves a $1.5 billion Anthropic settlement over pirated books used to train the Claude chatbot
A federal judge approved a $1.5 billion settlement for authors after Anthropic used pirated books to train its Claude chatbot.Summary
A federal judge has approved a $1.5 billion copyright settlement involving Anthropic, an artificial intelligence company. Under the agreement, Anthropic will pay thousands of authors approximately $3,000 per book for the use of pirated copies of their works to train the Claude chatbot. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin ruled that the class-action settlement provides "meaningful relief" to the affected parties. Currently, about 91% of the 482,000 books covered by the ruling have already been claimed by authors or publishers.
The legal battle began in 2024 when bestselling novelist Andrea Bartz and two other authors filed a lawsuit. While a previous ruling by retired Judge William Alsup suggested that training AI on books could be considered "fair use," he also found that Anthropic had wrongfully acquired millions of books through pirate websites. This settlement represents the largest known copyright recovery in history and serves as a landmark case among numerous ongoing AI-related copyright lawsuits.
(Source：The Times Of India)