Artificial intelligence company Anthropic has settled a lawsuit brought by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson over copyright infringement, per Reuters. The authors accused the company of using illegally obtained material to train its large language model, Claude. Anthropic (like other AI companies) argued that using the works to train Claude counted as fair use. A judge in the case agreed that Claude’s output was ultimately transformative, but Anthropic still would’ve been on the hook for appropriating the work (the company was accused of illegally downloading up to seven million books) without permission or payment in a potentially very expensive trial.
Anthropic wisely decided to circumvent the trial and skip straight to a payout. “This historic settlement will benefit all class members,” Justin Nelson, a lawyer for the authors, said in a statement. “We look forward to announcing details of the settlement in the coming weeks.”
Whatever the settlement details are, the payout is likely to be less than what Anthropic would’ve had to pay should it have been found liable in the copyright infringement case. Per Reuters, under copyright law damages can reach up to $150,000 per work. Multiply that by the alleged seven million or so books Anthropic was said to have downloaded, and you can see why the company didn’t want to take its chances on a trial. Instead, the Amazon-backed company can now continue forward unhindered in ushering in our AI slop future. It’s the country’s first major AI settlement and perhaps a bellwether of what’s to come, though other similar copyright suits have a bit more firepower behind them: rather than being brought by a few individual writers, pending suits have been brought by other megacorps like Universal Music Group and Disney and Universal. With AI still a legal wild west, the results of these upcoming lawsuits could set precedents that shape the future of technology for years to come.
