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Anthropic has agreed to pay at least $1.5 billion to settle a class action lawsuit with a group of authors, who claimed the artificial intelligence startup had illegally accessed their books.
The company will pay roughly $3,000 per book plus interest, and agreed to destroy the datasets containing the allegedly pirated material, according to a filing on Friday.
The lawsuit against Anthropic has been closely watched by AI startups and media companies that have been trying to determine what copyright infringement means in the AI era. If Anthropic’s settlement is approved, it will be the largest publicly reported copyright recovery in history, according to the filing.
“This settlement sends a powerful message to AI companies and creators alike that taking copyrighted works from these pirate websites is wrong,” Justin Nelson, the attorney for the plaintiffs, told CNBC in a statement.
Anthropic didn’t immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, was brought last year by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson. The suit alleged that Anthropic had carried out “largescale copyright infringement by downloading and commercially exploiting books that it obtained from allegedly pirated datasets,” the filing said.
In June, a judge ruled that Anthropic’s use of books to train its AI models was “fair use,” but ordered a trial to assess whether the company infringed on copyright by obtaining works from the databases Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. The case was slated to proceed to trial in December, according to Friday’s filing.
Earlier this week, Anthropic said it closed a $13 billion funding round that valued the company at $183 billion. The financing was led by Iconiq, Fidelity Management and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
