Anthropic settles AI book piracy lawsuit

Anthropic has settled a class action lawsuit with a group of US authors who accused the AI startup of copyright infringement. In a legal filing on Tuesday, Anthropic says it has negotiated a “proposed class settlement,” allowing it to skip a trial that would have determined how much the company owes for allegedly training its AI models on pirated work.

The terms of the settlement still aren’t clear, but it stems from a copyright lawsuit filed by writers Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson last year, which claimed Anthropic trained its Claude AI models on an open-source dataset filled with pirated materials.

Anthropic scored a major victory in June when Judge William Alsup ruled that training AI models on legally purchased books counts as fair use, but he left the door open for further litigation. In July, Judge Alsup approved a class action lawsuit from US authors that accused Anthropic of violating copyright laws “by doing Napster-style downloading of millions of works.” Anthropic was set to go to trial over the piracy claims in December, where it could’ve faced billions or more than $1 trillion in penalties, according to Wired.

The settlement is expected to be finalized on September 3rd. “This historic settlement will benefit all class members,” Justin Nelson, an attorney for the authors, said in a statement to The Verge. “We look forward to announcing details of the settlement in the coming weeks.” Anthropic declined to comment.