Anthropic agrees to $1.5 billion settlement for training their AI on pirated books

[Free]

Woof.

Sadly, even an amount that high isn't likely to bankrupt the company.

Anthropic Agrees to $1.5 Billion Settlement for Downloading Pirated Books to Train AI

Authors sued after it was revealed Anthropic downloaded the books from Library Genesis.

gizmodo.com

Anthropic has agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a lawsuit brought by authors and publishers over its use of millions of copyrighted books to train the models for its AI chatbot Claude, according to a legal filing posted online.

A federal judge found in June that Anthropic’s use of 7 million pirated books was protected under fair use but that holding the digital works in a “central library” violated copyright law. The judge ruled that executives at the company knew they were downloading pirated works, and a trial was scheduled for December.

The settlement, which was presented to a federal judge on Friday, still needs final approval but would pay $3,000 per book to hundreds of thousands of authors, according to the New York Times. The $1.5 billion settlement would be the largest payout in the history of U.S. copyright law, though the amount paid per work has often been higher. For example, in 2012, a woman in Minnesota paid about $9,000 per song downloaded, a figure brought down after she was initially ordered to pay over $60,000 per song.

I guess Anthropic decided their original claim of fair use was something of a lie missstatement.

 

[Free]

Interesting development.

Judge: Anthropic’s $1.5B settlement is being shoved “down the throat of authors”

Feeling “misled,” judge refuses to rubber-stamp Anthropic's proposed settlement.

arstechnica.com

At a hearing Monday, US District Judge William Alsup blasted a proposed $1.5 billion settlement over Anthropic's rampant piracy of books to train AI.

The proposed settlement comes in a case where Anthropic could have owed more than $1 trillion in damages after Alsup certified a class that included up to 7 million claimants whose works were illegally downloaded by the AI company.

Instead, critics fear Anthropic will get off cheaply, striking a deal with authors suing that covers less than 500,000 works and paying a small fraction of its total valuation (currently $183 billion) to get away with the massive theft. Defector noted that the settlement doesn't even require Anthropic to admit wrongdoing, while the company continues raising billions based on models trained on authors' works. Most recently, Anthropic raised $13 billion in a funding round, making back about 10 times the proposed settlement amount after announcing the deal.

Alsup expressed grave concerns that lawyers rushed the deal, which he said now risks being shoved "down the throat of authors," Bloomberg Law reported.

 

[Casey Pelous]

Interesting development.

Judge: Anthropic’s $1.5B settlement is being shoved “down the throat of authors”

Feeling “misled,” judge refuses to rubber-stamp Anthropic's proposed settlement.

arstechnica.com

I believe Meta is being sued on the same grounds. What a pity.

 

[Beebo Brink]

According to a letter I received today, I have a claim in the class action lawsuit against Anthropic.

I've published a few novels, but I never thought to pursue a claim for any of them. One of those novels, however, was co-written with a few other people, and I'm assuming at least one of them had the wits to enter a claim for that title.

So now I have to focus on this information and read through lots of legal language (which is why I never followed through for my own books, because brain fog makes this way too hard), and figure out what exactly I'm expected to do to claim my portion of the settlement.

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

According to a letter I received today, I have a claim in the class action lawsuit against Anthropic.

I've published a few novels, but I never thought to pursue a claim for any of them. One of those novels, however, was co-written with a few other people, and I'm assuming at least one of them had the wits to enter a claim for that title.

So now I have to focus on this information and read through lots of legal language (which is why I never followed through for my own books, because brain fog makes this way too hard), and figure out what exactly I'm expected to do to claim my portion of the settlement.

I wish you the best of luck! My experience with class action suits of this nature is you will be expected to do a lot of paper work to MAYBE claim a trivial amount of money. I'd imagine following through is only worth it to give the finger to the AI bros.

 

[Beebo Brink]

I wish you the best of luck! My experience with class action suits of this nature is you will be expected to do a lot of paper work to MAYBE claim a trivial amount of money.

I'm quite relieved to learn -- after trying to file claims on the settlement website -- that claims have already been filed for each of my three titles. I'm assuming that either the publisher (Pocket Books) or possibly my literary agent took the necessary action. Probably the publisher, because these were "work-for-hire" books on their licensed intellectual property. Which means I'm probably going to get very little, if any, of the settlement money by the time it works its way down the money chain. On the other hand, I don't have to DO anything, which is fine by me.

I'm long past expecting any more money from these writing projects that date back to the 1990s. My royalty payment for 2025 was something like $6, which I don't think I even received because it wasn't enough for my agent to cut a check. (But I still had to declare it on my taxes.)

 

[Veritable Quandry]

I get a report whenever my dissertation is downloaded. For a decade it got one a year on average. The last few years it has been accessed 50+ times and all of the addresses are data centers.

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

I get a report whenever my dissertation is downloaded. For a decade it got one a year on average. The last few years it has been accessed 50+ times and all of the addresses are data centers.

Robots like you!

 

[Free]

Anthropic’s $1.5B copyright settlement is getting messy as judge delays approval

Lawyers accused of rushing historic settlement to seize $320 million in fees.

arstechnica.com

After several authors and class members raised objections to Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement over its widespread book piracy to train AI, a federal judge has delayed final approvals of the settlement.

On Thursday, US District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin declined to rubber-stamp what’s regarded as the largest copyright settlement in US history. Instead, she wanted to better understand why some class members were objecting and opting out of the settlement. So, she asked authors to address key concerns of objectors, who argued that lawyers’ compensation was way too high and payments to class members were a “pittance.”

Ars reviewed several objections to the settlement, as well as letters from objectors who claimed that the authors’ legal team was trying to unfairly shut them out from voicing concerns.

Basically, they're pissed off with the lawyers legal fees reaching into hundreds of millions.