The artificial-intelligence company Anthropic has settled a class-action copyright-infringement lawsuit brought by a group of authors, Reuters reports.
Writers Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson sued Anthropic, the San Francisco-based startup, last year, claiming that the company used pirated copies of their books to train Claude, a series of large language models.
In June, U.S. District Judge William Alsup ruled that Anthropic did not run afoul of copyright law when it used the books to train Claude, citing the “fair use” doctrine, but ordered the lawsuit to trial because the books were pirated.
Anthropic announced the settlement in a court filing which did not include details about how much the authors might receive from the company.
Justin Nelson, an attorney representing the authors, said in a statement, “This historic settlement will benefit all class members. We look forward to announcing details of the settlement in the coming weeks."
Wired magazine talked to law professor Edward Lee about the settlement, who said, “It’s a stunning turn of events, given how Anthropic was fighting tooth and nail in two courts in this case. And the company recently hired a new trial team. But they had few defenses at trial, given how Judge Alsup ruled. So Anthropic was starting at the risk of statutory damages in ‘doomsday’ amounts.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
