Anthropic to pay $1.5 bn over pirated books

AFP | New

Email : editor@newsofbahrain.com

York 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 models, according to court documents filed yesterday.

“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.