Anthropic tells US judge it will pay $1.5 billion to settle author class action | CNN Business:
Anthropic told a San Francisco federal judge on Friday that it has agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit from a group of authors who accused the artificial intelligence company of using their books to train its AI chatbot Claude without permission.
Anthropic and the plaintiffs in a court filing asked U.S. District Judge William Alsup to approve the settlement, after announcing the agreement in August without disclosing the terms or amount.
“If approved, this landmark settlement will be the largest publicly reported copyright recovery in history, larger than any other copyright class action settlement or any individual copyright case litigated to final judgment,” the plaintiffs said in the filing.
The proposed deal marks the first settlement in a string of lawsuits against tech companies including OpenAI, Microsoft and Meta Platforms over their use of copyrighted material to train generative AI systems.
This is a notable settlement because previous cases have held AI training on copyrighted materials to fall under the “Fair Use” exception. I think the issue is ultimately headed to the Supreme Court.