<\/p>\n Thriller novelist Andrea Bartz is photographed in her home, in the Brooklyn borough of New York, Thursday, Sept. 4, 2025 (AP Photo\/Richard Drew)<\/p>\n Thriller novelist Andrea Bartz is photographed in her home, in the Brooklyn borough of New York, Thursday, Sept. 4, 2025 (AP Photo\/Richard Drew)<\/p>\n Read More<\/p>\n A federal judge dealt the case a mixed ruling in June<\/a>, finding that training AI chatbots on copyrighted books wasn\u2019t illegal but that Anthropic wrongfully acquired millions of books through pirate websites. <\/p>\n If Anthropic had not settled, experts say losing the case after a scheduled December trial could have cost the San Francisco-based company even more money.<\/p>\n \u201cWe were looking at a strong possibility of multiple billions of dollars, enough to potentially cripple or even put Anthropic out of business,\u201d said William Long, a legal analyst for Wolters Kluwer.<\/p>\n U.S. District Judge William Alsup of San Francisco has scheduled a Monday hearing to review the settlement terms.<\/p>\n Anthropic said in a statement Friday that the settlement, if approved, \u201cwill resolve the plaintiffs\u2019 remaining legacy claims.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe remain committed to developing safe AI systems that help people and organizations extend their capabilities, advance scientific discovery, and solve complex problems,\u201d said Aparna Sridhar, the company\u2019s deputy general counsel.<\/p>\n As part of the settlement, the company has also agreed to destroy the original book files it downloaded.<\/p>\n Books are known<\/a> to be important sources of data \u2014 in essence, billions of words carefully strung together \u2014 that are needed to build the AI large language models behind chatbots like Anthropic\u2019s Claude and its chief rival, OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT. <\/p>\n Alsup\u2019s June ruling found that Anthropic had downloaded more than 7 million digitized books that it \u201cknew had been pirated.\u201d It started with nearly 200,000 from an online library called Books3, assembled by AI researchers outside of OpenAI to match the vast collections on which ChatGPT was trained.<\/p>\n Debut thriller novel \u201cThe Lost Night\u201d by Bartz, a lead plaintiff in the case, was among those found in the dataset.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Thriller novelist Andrea Bartz is photographed in her home, in the Brooklyn borough of New York, Thursday, Sept. 4, 2025 (AP Photo\/Richard Drew)<\/p>\n Thriller novelist Andrea Bartz is photographed in her home, in the Brooklyn borough of New York, Thursday, Sept. 4, 2025 (AP Photo\/Richard Drew)<\/p>\n Read More<\/p>\n Anthropic later took at least 5 million copies from the pirate website Library Genesis, or LibGen, and at least 2 million copies from the Pirate Library Mirror, Alsup wrote.<\/p>\n The Authors Guild told its thousands of members last month that it expected \u201cdamages will be minimally $750 per work and could be much higher\u201d if Anthropic was found at trial to have willfully infringed their copyrights. The settlement\u2019s higher award \u2014 approximately $3,000 per work \u2014 likely reflects a smaller pool of affected books, after taking out duplicates and those without copyright. <\/p>\n On Friday, Mary Rasenberger, CEO of the Authors Guild, called the settlement \u201can excellent result for authors, publishers, and rightsholders generally, sending a strong message to the AI industry that there are serious consequences when they pirate authors\u2019 works to train their AI, robbing those least able to afford it.\u201d <\/p>\n The Danish Rights Alliance, which successfully fought to take down one of those shadow libraries, said Friday that the settlement would be of little help to European writers and publishers whose works aren\u2019t registered with the U.S. Copyright Office.<\/p>\n \u201cOn the one hand, it\u2019s comforting to see that compiling AI training datasets by downloading millions of books from known illegal file-sharing sites comes at a price,\u201d said Thomas Heldrup, the group\u2019s head of content protection and enforcement.<\/p>\n On the other hand, Heldrup said it fits a tech industry playbook to grow a business first and later pay a relatively small fine, compared to the size of the business, for breaking the rules.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is my understanding that these companies see a settlement like the Anthropic one as a price of conducting business in a fiercely competitive space,\u201d Heldrup said.<\/p>\n The privately held Anthropic, founded by ex-OpenAI leaders in 2021, earlier this week put its value at $183 billion after raising another $13 billion in investments.<\/p>\n Anthropic also said it expects to make $5 billion in sales this year, but, like OpenAI and many other AI startups, it has never reported making a profit, relying instead on investors to back the high costs of developing AI technology for the expectation of future payoffs.<\/p>\n The settlement could influence other disputes, including an ongoing lawsuit by authors and newspapers against OpenAI<\/a> and its business partner Microsoft, and cases against Meta<\/a>and Midjourney<\/a>. And just as the Anthropic settlement terms were filed, another group of authors sued Apple on Friday in the same San Francisco federal court.<\/p>\n \u201cThis indicates that maybe for other cases, it\u2019s possible for creators and AI companies to reach settlements without having to essentially go for broke in court,\u201d said Long, the legal analyst.<\/p>\n The industry, including Anthropic, had largely praised Alsup\u2019s June ruling because he found that training AI systems on copyrighted works so chatbots can produce their own passages of text qualified as \u201cfair use\u201d under U.S. copyright law because it was \u201cquintessentially transformative.\u201d<\/p>\n Comparing the AI model to \u201cany reader aspiring to be a writer,\u201d Alsup wrote that Anthropic \u201ctrained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them \u2014 but to turn a hard corner and create something different.\u201d<\/p>\n But documents disclosed in court showed Anthropic employees\u2019 internal concerns about the legality of their use of pirate sites. The company later shifted its approach and hired Tom Turvey, the former Google executive in charge of Google Books, a searchable library of digitized books that successfully weathered years of copyright battles<\/a>.<\/p>\n With his help, Anthropic began buying books in bulk, tearing off the bindings and scanning each page before feeding the digitized versions into its AI model, according to court documents. That was legal but didn\u2019t undo the earlier piracy, according to the judge.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 Artificial intelligence company Anthropic has agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class-action…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":203798,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7060,112497,738,64,276,171,57,59,65,25618,112492,112491,336,112498,405,55405,2750,158,112494,112496,112495,61,67,132,68,112493],"class_list":{"0":"post-203797","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-alphabet","9":"tag-aparna-sridhar","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-business","12":"tag-california","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-general-news","15":"tag-inc","16":"tag-information-technology","17":"tag-intellectual-property","18":"tag-justin-nelson","19":"tag-kirk-wallace-johnson","20":"tag-lawsuits","21":"tag-mary-rasenberger","22":"tag-new-york","23":"tag-openai-inc","24":"tag-san-francisco","25":"tag-technology","26":"tag-thomas-heldrup","27":"tag-todd-long","28":"tag-tom-turvey","29":"tag-u-s-news","30":"tag-united-states","31":"tag-unitedstates","32":"tag-us","33":"tag-william-alsup"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115154882737669947","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203797","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=203797"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/203797\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/203798"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=203797"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=203797"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=203797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/p>\n
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