Anthropic reaches a settlement over authors' class-action piracy lawsuit

Anthropic has settled a class-action lawsuit brought by a group of authors for an undisclosed sum. The move means the company will avoid a potentially more costly ruling if the case regarding its use of copyright materials to train artificial intelligence tools had moved forward.

In June, Judge William Alsup handed down a mixed result in the case, ruling that Anthropic's move to train LLMs on copyrighted materials constituted fair use. However the company's illegal and unpaid acquisition of those copyrighted materials was deemed available for the authors to pursue as a piracy case. With statutory damages for piracy beginning at $750 per infringed work and a library of pirated works estimated to number about 7 million, Anthropic could have been on the hook for billions of dollars.

Litigation around AI and copyright is still shaking out, with no clear precedents emerging yet ...