Antropic's $1.5 billion settlement with authors in AI piracy lawsuit placed on hold by judge
U.S. District Judge William Alsup expressed concerns over the recent ruling against the AI company Anthropic, which awarded a settlement of $1.5 billion to authors who accused it of using pirated copies of their published works to train AI models.
As reported by AP, Alsup believed the judgment was "full of pitfalls," and scheduled another hearing for September 25. The judgment, which would award approximately $3,000 for each of about 465,000 titles affected, was scrutinized. Alsup said he needed a "drop-dead list" of the total number of books pirated by September 15 to ensure the number won't swell with more lawsuits "coming out of the woodwork."
President of the Association of American Publishers and the Author's Guild, Maria Pallante, told Reuters that Alsup's decision "demonstrated a lack of understanding of how the publishing industry works."
"It's critical that the number of works included in the settlement is complete," Pallante said. "and the Court's reluctance to give the parties time to do that — without any explanation — is troubling."
Author's Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger said she was "shocked by the court's offhand suggestion" and accused the groups of "working behind the scenes in ways that could pressure authors, when that is precisely the opposite of our proposed role as informational advisors."
"The Court seems to be envisioning an administratively challenging claims process that would be unworkable for the class members, and lead authors and publishers into collateral litigation for years to come," added Pallante.
Anthropic, backed by Google and Amazon, was sued last year by authors who argued that it had downloaded and used pirated copies of their works to train its Claude line-up of AI models. The settlement is believed to be the largest "publicly reported recovery in the history of U.S. copyright litigation."
