By Blake Brittain (Reuters) -Artificial intelligence company Anthropic said in a court filing on Tuesday that it has resolved a class action lawsuit from a group of U.S. authors who argued that its AI training infringed their copyrights, marking the first settlement in a string of such major industry lawsuits. The California federal judge overseeing […]
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Anthropic settles class action from US authors alleging copyright infringement
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By Blake Brittain
(Reuters) -Artificial intelligence company Anthropic said in a court filing on Tuesday that it has resolved a class action lawsuit from a group of U.S. authors who argued that its AI training infringed their copyrights, marking the first settlement in a string of such major industry lawsuits.
The California federal judge overseeing the case said in a June ruling that Anthropic might have illegally downloaded as many as seven million books from pirate websites, which could have made it liable for billions of dollars in damages if the authors’ case was successful.
An Anthropic spokesperson declined to comment on the court filing, which did not describe the terms of the settlement.
“This historic settlement will benefit all class members,” the authors’ attorney Justin Nelson said in a statement. “We look forward to announcing details of the settlement in the coming weeks.”
U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco ordered the parties to file requests for preliminary approval of the settlement by September 5.
The lawsuit was one of several brought by authors, news outlets and other copyright owners against companies including OpenAI, Microsoft and Meta Platforms over their AI training.
The settlement could be “huge” in shaping litigation against AI companies, said Syracuse University College of Law Professor Shubha Ghosh, who is not involved in the case.
“The devil is in the details of the settlement and future litigation about the terms of the settlement.”
Writers Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson filed their class action against Anthropic last year. They argued the company, which is backed by Amazon and Alphabet, unlawfully used pirated books without permission or compensation to teach its AI assistant Claude to respond to human prompts.
AI companies have argued their systems make fair use of copyrighted material to create new, transformative content. Alsup found that Anthropic made fair use of authors’ work for AI training, but violated their rights by saving millions of pirated books to a “central library” that would not necessarily be used for that purpose.
A trial was scheduled to begin in December to determine how much Anthropic owed for the alleged piracy. U.S. copyright law says that willful copyright infringement can justify statutory damages of up to $150,000 per work.
(Reporting by Blake Brittain; Editing by David Bario, Nia Williams and Richard Chang)