Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5 billion in first-of-its-kind AI copyright lawsuit over book piracy

Anthropic, an AI startup company behind the Claude family of AI models, has agreed to a settlement of $1.5 billion in a class-action lawsuit by authors who accused the company of using copyrighted works to train its AI models.

The company, backed by Amazon and Google, found itself in hot water after authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson filed a class action lawsuit against it last year. Their lawyers argued that Anthropic used tons of pirated books to train its Claude AI models.

This settlement is "believed to be the largest publicly reported recovery in the history of US copyright litigation." It covers approximately 500,000 copyrighted works that the company stole to train its AI models.

In a statement shared with Reuters, the lawyers representing the authors believed the settlement "sends a powerful message to AI companies and creators alike that taking copyrighted works from these pirate websites is wrong." They called it the "first of its kind" copyright recovery in the "AI era."

Anthropic told Reuters they were "committed to developing safe AI systems that help people and organizations extend their capabilities, advance scientific discovery, and solve complex problems."

Mary Rasenberger, CEO of the Authors Guild, said the settlement "is a vital step in acknowledging that AI companies cannot simply steal authors' creative work to build their AI just because they need books to develop quality LLMs."

Anthropic will pay the amount in four installments: $300 million after preliminary approval, $300 million after final approval, $450 million within 12 months of the initial approval, and $450 million within 24 months of the preliminary approval.

The $1.5 billion sum will be split among rightsholders, lawyers' fees, and expenses. Anthropic downloaded nearly 7 million copies of books from Libgen and PiLiMi, and after filtering out duplicates, will pay approximately $3000 for 500,000 titles.