Federal judge approves AI company 'Anthropic' to pay $1.5 billion to settle copyright lawsuit

A federal judge in San Francisco preliminarily approved the $1.5 billion settlement between Anthropic and a group of authors who claimed infringement of their rights by the use of pirated books to train their AI. If given final approval, the settlement would be the largest copyright recovery publicly reported to date in the United States.

The lawsuit—filed by Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson in the Northern District of California—alleged that the startup downloaded thousands of works from repositories such as Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. The settlement, according to CNBC News, provides for the destruction of the data sets with allegedly illicit material collected.

“We are grateful for the Court’s action today, which brings us one step closer to real accountability for Anthropic and puts all AI companies on notice they can’t shortcut the law or override creators’ rights,” the authors said in a joint statement Thursday.

Aparna Sridhar, Anthropic's deputy general counsel, also welcomed the approval of the preliminary settlement in a statement sent to AFP.

"We are pleased the court has granted preliminary approval of the settlement," Sridhar said. "The decision will allow us to focus on developing safe AI systems."

Startup Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI employees, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.

Anthropic, valued at $183 billion, is known for its artificial intelligence assistant Claude.

In previous decisions by the same court, Judge William Alsup, who preliminarily approved the settlement, noted that training with copyrighted books can be considered a transformative use; however, he questioned how Anthropic obtained the works.

After "weeks of rigorous evaluation," the court finally found the covenant to be "fair" and moved forward with approval. Final approval will come eventually, after potential beneficiaries are notified and the claims process concludes. An estimated $3,000 will be awarded for each work.