AI company Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with authors

Anthropic, a major artificial intelligence company, has agreed to pay at least $1.5 billion to settle a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by a group of authors.

Anthropic, a major artificial intelligence company, has agreed to pay at least $1.5 billion to settle a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by a group of authors who alleged the platform had illegally used pirated copies of their books to train large-language models, according to court documents.

“If approved, this landmark settlement will be the largest publicly reported copyright recovery in history, larger than any other copyright class action settlement or any individual copyright case litigated to final judgment,” said Justin Nelson, a lawyer for the authors.

The lawsuit, filed in federal court in California last year, centered on roughly 500,000 published works. The proposed settlement amounts to a gross recovery of $3,000 per work, Nelson said in a memorandum to the judge in the case.

“This result is nothing short of remarkable,” Nelson added.

In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs alleged that Anthrophic had “committed large-scale copyright infringement” by downloading and “commercially exploiting” books that it had allegedly gotten from pirating websites such as Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror.