Anthropic will pay a record-breaking $1.5 billion to settle copyright lawsuit with authors

Anthropic, the AI company behind the Claude chatbot, has agreed to pay a record-breaking $1.5 billion to settle a class action lawsuit brought by a group of 500,000 authors. The settlement is the largest-ever payout for a copyright case in the United States. The lawsuit alleged that Anthropic had used copyrighted works from websites like Library Genesis (LibGen) to train its AI models, which the authors claimed was a violation of their copyrights. While a judge ruled in June that Anthropic's use of the copyrighted material was considered fair use, the authors were still able to pursue piracy claims against the company. As part of the settlement, Anthropic has agreed to delete everything that was downloaded illegally and stated that it did not use any pirated works to build its publicly released AI technologies. The company has not admitted to any wrongdoing. This settlement is being seen as a significant milestone in the ongoing legal battles between AI companies and creators over the use of copyrighted material. It sets a precedent for AI companies to pay copyright owners for the use of their works and sends a strong message to the industry.