Anthropic agrees to $1.5B settlement in AI piracy lawsuit News
LubosHouska / Pixabay
Anthropic agrees to $1.5B settlement in AI piracy lawsuit

AI company Anthropic agreed to a $1.5 billion settlement on Friday, aimed at resolving a sweeping class-action lawsuit brought by authors who alleged the company used pirated copies of their books to train its chatbot, Claude.

According to the proposed agreement, which is subject to judicial approval, the settlement provides roughly $3,000 to each of the authors for the estimated 500,000 books covered. If approved, it would make this “the largest publicly reported copyright recovery in history.”

The Authors Guild, which represents thousands of writers, welcomed the outcome. On Friday, its CEO, Mary Rasenberger, called the settlement “an excellent result for authors, publishers, and rights-holders generally, sending a strong message to the AI industry that there are serious consequences when they pirate authors’ works to train their AI, robbing those least able to afford it.”

The lawsuit was initiated last year by author Andrea Bartz and writers Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson. They later came to represent a broader class of writers and publishers after Anthropic was accused of downloading millions of pirated books to train its AI models.

In June, U.S. District Judge William Alsup ruled that while training AI chatbots on copyrighted books was not in itself illegal, Anthropic had wrongfully obtained more than 7 million digitized works from piracy websites, including Books3, Library Genesis, and the Pirate Library Mirror.

Had the company gone to trial in December and lost, analysts said the financial blow could have been devastating. “We were looking at a strong possibility of multiple billions of dollars, enough to potentially cripple or even put Anthropic out of business,” said William Long, a legal analyst with Wolters Kluwer.

The deal comes amid heightened scrutiny of AI companies. Last month, X Corp and X.AI filed an antitrust lawsuit against Apple and OpenAI, accusing them of monopolistic practices in smartphones and generative AI chatbots. Additionally, in Texas, Attorney General Ken Paxton recently launched an investigation into Meta and Character.ai over whether their chatbots misled children with deceptive claims of providing therapeutic support, raising concerns about privacy and data exploitation.

THIS DAY @ LAW

Pope Innocent VIII authorizes Germany witchcraft prosecutions

Pope Innocent VIII issued the papal bull Summis desiderantes affectibus on December 5, 1484, authorizing Dominican friars and witch hunters Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger to prosecute witchcraft in Germany. The prosecutions would later give rise to the 1486 publication of Kramer and Sprenger's Malleus Malificarum ("Hammer of the Witches") which prescribed torture as a way to coerce confessions out of suspected witches. Historians view the text as having promoted a misogynistic witch craze in late medieval Europe. Read the full papal bull.

21st Amendment ended Prohibition

On December 5, 1933, the 21st Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified, ending the ban on the legal sale and importation of alcohol that had been introduced in 1919 by the 18th Amendment. Learn how the Voluntary Committee of Lawyers helped bring about Prohibition's repeal.

Egypt breaks diplomatic relations with Syria, Libya, Algeria and South Yemen

On December 5, 1977, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat broke off diplomatic relations with Syria, Libya, Algeria and South Yemen in response to the Declaration of Tripoli, which imposed sanctions on Eygpt. These hardline Arab nations had promulgated the Declaration in order to punish Egypt for establishing diplomatic relations with Israel. In 1979, Egypt signed a formal peace treaty with Israel, leading to Sadat's assassination in 1981. Learn more from the BBC.