Authors celebrate “historic” settlement coming soon in Anthropic class action

Authors are celebrating a "historic" settlement expected to be reached soon in a class-action lawsuit over Anthropic's AI training data.

On Tuesday, US District Judge William Alsup confirmed that Anthropic and the authors "believe they have a settlement in principle" and will file a motion for preliminary approval of the settlement by September 5.

The settlement announcement comes after Alsup certified what AI industry advocates criticized as the largest copyright class action of all time. Although the lawsuit was raised by three authors—Andrea Bartz, Kirk Wallace Johnson, and Charles Graeber—Alsup allowed up to 7 million claimants to join based on the large number of books that Anthropic may have illegally downloaded to train its AI models.

If every author in the class filed a claim, industry advocates warned, it would "financially ruin" the entire AI industry.

It's unclear if the class certification prompted the settlement or ...