“It will provide meaningful compensation for each class work and sets a precedent requiring AI companies to pay copyright owners,” an attorney for the plaintiffs said. “This settlement sends a powerful message to AI companies and creators alike that taking copyrighted works from these pirate websites is wrong.”
Artificial intelligence company Anthropic has agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by a group of writers.
According to National Public Radio, should the settlement be approved by the court, Anthropic will pay about $3,000 for each of the 500,000 books covered by the agreement.
The case is currently under the jurisdiction of U.S. Senior District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco. Alsup has since indicated that he will make a decision on the settlement and shall consider an approval sometime in the coming week.
If the lawsuit is resolved and the agreement approved, it will mark the first time that a technology company has paid a significant amount of money to settle claims of copyright infringement.
Anthropic AI is best known for “Claude,” its signature large language model, or LLM.
Large language models, like Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, use a combination of tools and protocols to generate text. However, while advanced LLMs are often considered forms of artificial intelligence, they are not necessarily self-sufficient and must be trained on large volumes of data.
Claude, for instance, was trained using data from “The Pile,” a massive, open-source dataset used in the creation and refinement of LLMs.
“Anthropic has admitted to using The Pile to train Claude,” the lawsuit says.
The lawsuit against Anthropic states that The Pile contains copyright-protected works—and that Anthropic’s use of such works does not fall under any “fair use”-type exception.
“Rather than obtaining permission and paying a fair price for the creations it exploits, Anthropic pirated them,” it alleges.
Attorneys for the plaintiff authors say that, if the proposal is approved by Alsup, it will constitute the single-largest “publicly reported copyright recovery in history.” Furthermore, the $1.5 billion settlement, less attorneys’ fees, is expected to set “a precedent of AI companies paying for their use of pirated [works].”
Anthropic’s legal team has said that it expects the settlement will resolve all of the plaintiffs’ outstanding claims.
“Today’s settlement, if approved, will resolve the plaintiffs’ remaining legacy claims,” Anthropic Deputy General Counsel Aparna Sridhar said in a statement. “We remain committed to developing safe AI systems that help people and organizations extend their capabilities, advance scientific discovery, and solve complex problems.”
Justin Nelson, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, has characterized the proposed agreement as a “landmark settlement” and the “first of its kind in the AI era.”
“It will provide meaningful compensation for each class work and sets a precedent requiring AI companies to pay copyright owners,” Nelson said. “This settlement sends a powerful message to AI companies and creators alike that taking copyrighted works from these pirate websites is wrong.”
Sources
AI company Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with authors
Anthropic Agrees to Pay $1.5 Billion to Settle Lawsuit With Book Authors
Anthropic settles with authors in first-of-its-kind AI copyright infringement lawsuit
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