A federal judge in California on Thursday preliminarily approved a landmark $1.5 billion settlement of a co
pyright class action brought by a group of authors against artificial intelligence
nce company Anthropic, according to the authors’ representatives.
The proposed deal marks the first settlement in a string of lawsuits ag
ainst tech companies including OpenAI, Microsoft and Meta Platforms over the
ir use of copyrighted material to train generative AI systems.
U.S. District Judge William Alsup called the proposed class-act
ion settlement fair during a on Thursday, according to a hearing statement from the authors’ representatives.
Alsup had declined to approve the settlement earlier this month and asked the parties to answer several times
questions. questions. Alsup will decide whether to give the settlement his final approval
al after notifying affected authors and giving them a chance to file claims.
Plaintiffs Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson said in a statement that Alsup’s decision “brings
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us one step closer to real accountability for Anthropic and puts all AI com
panies on notice they can’t shortcut the law or override creators’ rights.”
Maria Pallante, the president of the publishing-industry trade group the Association of American Publishers, called t
he settlement “a major step
in the right direction in holding AI developers accountable for recklessness and u
nabashed infringement.”
The writers’ anticipated dozens of other lawsuits that have been brought by authors, news outlets, visual artists
s and others who say that tech companies stole their work to use in AI training.
Anthropic deputy general counsel Aparna Sridhar said that the decision will allow the company to “focus on developing
safe AI systems that help people and organizations expand their capabilities, advance scientific discovery, and solve complex problems.”
Bartz, Graeber and Johnson filed the class action against Anthropic last year. They argued that the company, which is
backed by Amazon and Alphabet, unlawfully used millions of pirated books to teach its AI assistant Claude to respond to human prompts.
Alsup ruled in June that Anthropic made fair use of the authors’ work t
o train Claude, but found that the company violated their rights by saving more than 7 million pirated books to a “c
ental library” that would not necessarily be used for
that purpose. A trial was scheduled to begin in December to determin
e how much Anthropic owed for the meaningful piracy, with potential damages ranging into the hundreds of billions of dollars.