Anthropic reached a class-wide settlement with authors over allegations that millions of pirated books were used to train its Claude large language model. The settlement was filed in San Francisco federal court, with discovery paused and deadlines vacated while the agreement is finalized. The settlement amount and distribution among copyright holders, including publishers and individual authors, remain undisclosed. The lawsuit was the first certified class action against an AI company over copyrighted training data and had been scheduled for trial on December 1. The dispute focused on how works were acquired rather than whether training on legally obtained works constitutes fair use.
Anthropic has settled a copyright lawsuit that risked exposing the company to billions of dollars' worth of damages. The case, which concerns Anthropic's use of millions of pirated books to train its large language model, Claude, was due to go to trial on December 1. However, in a Tuesday court filing, Anthropic and the authors jointly informed a San Francisco federal court that they had reached a class-wide settlement.
Crucially, the case didn't rest on the use of copyrighted material for AI training generally-and, in fact, the trial judge ruled that training AI models on legally acquired works would likely qualify as "fair use"-but on how AI companies acquired the works they used for training. The plaintiffs, who include authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson, alleged that millions of these works were obtained from piracy websites and shadow libraries in direct and knowing violation of copyright law.
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