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Authors claim ‘historic win’ as Anthropic settles in AI copyright case
Tech giant Anthropic is settling with three authors who brought a copyright infringement lawsuit against the company that was due to go to trial in December.
Authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson brought the case in 2024, alleging that the company – which is behind the chatbot Claude – had illegally used their work to train its AI models.
In June, a federal judge in California, Judge William Alsup, ruled that AI model training on books that were legally obtained, but without the consent of their authors, still constituted fair use under US copyright law.
However, Alsup also said that the AI company may have illegally downloaded around seven million books from pirate websites – including LibGen – which could have made it liable for billions of dollars in damages if the authors won the case.
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In a court filing on Tuesday 26th August, Anthropic said the parties “have executed a binding term sheet intended to memorialize the terms of a proposed class settlement”, further indicating that there was agreement on “the core terms” of the settlement.
Justin Nelson, the authors’ lawyer, said in a statement: “This historic settlement will benefit all class members. We look forward to announcing details of the settlement in the coming weeks.”
According to the Authors Guild, while the details of the settlement have not been made public, including the amount of money that the authors will receive from Anthropic for copyright infringement, there will be a payout. A statement from the guild added: "We look forward to authors and publishers finally receiving the compensation they are owed for the brazen, intentional theft of their works."
Mary Rasenberger, CEO of the Authors Guild said: “We hope this sends a strong message to the AI industry that there are serious consequences when they pirate authors’ works to train their AI, and that Judge Alsup’s decision will steer them to start acting ethically to protect the future of the professional arts by seeking permission for the works they use to train their AI, rather than stealing from those least able to afford the loss.”
There are several other court cases relating to the training of books and AI going through US federal courts against OpenAI, Microsoft and others.
