Anthropics Resolves Copyright Infringement Case with a $1.5 Billion Settlement
Anthropic, a prominent AI company, has agreed to pay a hefty sum of $1.5 billion to settle a groundbreaking copyright infringement lawsuit. The case was initiated by authors who accused the company of illicitly using pirated books to train its Claude chatbot.
The settlement, which was announced last Friday, equates to approximately $3,000 per book for an estimated 500,000 works. This marks the largest publicly disclosed copyright settlement in history.
The lawsuit was filed by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson. They alleged that Anthropic downloaded millions of copyrighted books from pirate websites like Library Genesis without obtaining the necessary permissions.
As part of the agreement, Anthropic is obliged to destroy the datasets containing the allegedly pirated material.
Legal experts are of the opinion that this first-of-its-kind AI copyright settlement could set a precedent for other major tech companies facing similar lawsuits. This includes big names such as OpenAI, Meta, and Microsoft.