Anthropic settles copyright lawsuit with authors for $1.5 billion

A trial was scheduled to begin to determine the damages Anthropic owed for alleged piracy, with potential damages estimated in the hundreds of billions of dollars. However, the settlement agreement reached prior to this date preempted the need for the trial.

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U.S. District Judge William Alsup granted final approval for the $1.5 billion settlement between Anthropic and the authors. This landmark decision marked the settlement as the largest copyright recovery in U.S. history.

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Attorneys for the authors filed documents assuring Judge Alsup that the settlement process would be fair and consistent with due process. This filing addressed the judge's concerns about how the claims process would be handled to ensure all eligible authors were properly informed.

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Anthropic formally agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle the copyright lawsuit. The settlement, covering approximately 500,000 works, was disclosed in court filings, with authors potentially receiving about $3,000 per book. Mary Rasenberger, CEO of the Authors Guild, called it an "excellent result."

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Anthropic and the plaintiffs reached an agreement in principle to settle the class-action lawsuit. The announcement was made without disclosing the specific terms or the financial amount of the settlement at that time.

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The Authors Guild informed its members that they expected damages to be at least $750 per work in the ongoing lawsuit against Anthropic, with potential for much higher amounts if willful infringement was found.

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U.S. District Judge William Alsup ruled that while training AI on legally acquired copyrighted books was likely fair use, Anthropic's use of pirated copies was not. This ruling set the stage for a trial specifically on the piracy issue, as Anthropic had downloaded millions of pirated books.

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Authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson filed a class-action lawsuit against Anthropic in California, alleging copyright infringement for using pirated books to train its AI models. The suit claimed Anthropic downloaded millions of copyrighted books from "shadow libraries" like Library Genesis (LibGen) and Pirate Library Mirror (PiLiMi) to train its AI systems.

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