Anthropic to Pay $1.5 Billion in Landmark AI Copyright Settlement with Authors
A judge approved a $1.5 billion settlement between Anthropic and a group of U.S. authors who alleged that the company stole their work to train its AI models in a high-profile class-action lawsuit.
U.S. District Judge William Alsup issued the preliminary approval of the settlement — the first in lawsuits against AI firms over copyright use — in a San Francisco federal court on Thursday.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, was brought last year by a group of authors. It alleged that AI company Anthropic illegally downloaded nearly half a million books from pirated databases like Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror to train its AI systems without permission or compensation.
Anthropic’s $1.5 million settlement with the group of authors is the largest publicly reported copyright recovery in history and could lead more AI companies to pay rights holders for use of their works.
According to a report by AP News, about 465,000 books are on the list of works pirated by Anthropic. The settlement will pay authors and publishers about $3,000 for each of the books covered by the agreement. Judge Alsup describes the settlement as “fair” but adds that distributing it to all parties will be “complicated.”
Meanwhile, the Association of American Publishers called the settlement a “major step in the right direction in holding AI developers accountable for reckless and unabashed infringement.”
The settlement does not apply to future works, and Anthropic also agreed to destroy the datasets containing the allegedly pirated material.
Settlement May Set Benchmark for AI Copyright Cases
AI companies have been watching the Anthropic case closely, seeing it as a test of how copyright law will be defined in the age of AI. In the lawsuit brought by the authors, Judge Alsop ruled that Anthropic made fair use of the authors’ work to train Claude, but found that the company violated their rights by saving more than 7 million pirated books to a “central library” that would not necessarily be used for that purpose.
Settlements of this kind do not set legal precedent but may shape the course of ongoing litigation in the fast-evolving field of AI and copyright. The $1.5 billion deal could mark a turning point, compelling other AI companies to compensate rights holders for the use of their works.
Legal experts suggest the settlement may set the stage for future payments, whether through court rulings, negotiated settlements, or licensing agreements. The Anthropic case is also expected to become a reference point in ongoing copyright lawsuits against AI firms. Lawyers at Ropes & Gray say that plaintiffs in similar cases may point to the $3,000 per-work figure as a starting point for damages negotiations, and courts may look to the structure of this settlement when fashioning remedies.
There are several ongoing cases against AI companies. A group of artists filed a class-action lawsuit against AI image generators Stable Diffusion and Midjourney, among others.
Meanwhile, in June, Disney and Universal filed a joint lawsuit against Midjourney, accusing it of widespread copyright infringement in a case that could help redefine Hollywood’s copyright rules. Warner Bros later joined the companies’ lawsuit against the generative AI company.
Getty Images is also suing Stable Diffusion, accusing the AI image generator of stealing over 12 million of its copyrighted photos. The photo agency is seeking up to $150,000 per infringement, or up to $1.8 trillion.
Image credits: Header photo licensed via Depositphotos.
