Anthropic, a major artificial intelligence company, has agreed to pay at least $1.5 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit filed by a group of authors accusing the company of illegally using their books to train its AI models without permission. The authors alleged that Anthropic sourced approximately 500,000 published works, many of which were pirated copies obtained from shadow libraries like Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror.
The proposed settlement amounts to about $3,000 per copyrighted work, making it the largest publicly reported copyright recovery in U.S. history, surpassing any previous copyright class-action settlements or individual copyright judgments. Anthropic has committed to deleting the illegally obtained copies from its datasets.
While a federal judge ruled that Anthropic's use of the works for AI training falls under “fair use” due to the transformative nature of the technology, the company was found to have infringed authors' rights by downloading and retaining pirated versions. The settlement resolves the remaining claims without any admission of wrongdoing by Anthropic.
The lawsuit, originally filed by journalists and authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, marks a critical milestone in the broader legal struggles between content creators and AI developers. High-profile authors such as John Grisham and George R.R. Martin are involved in similar litigation against other AI firms like OpenAI.
Anthropic’s deputy general counsel, Aparna Sridhar, emphasized the firm's commitment to ethical AI development that supports human and organizational capabilities while respecting intellectual property rights.
This settlement is expected to influence ongoing and future cases concerning AI training data and copyright, potentially encouraging more AI companies to pursue licensing agreements and set industry standards on intellectual property use.