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UPDATE 9/9: Judge William Alsup has denied the motion to approve the deal after finding some important claim details missing.
Original Story:
Anthropic has settled a class-action lawsuit brought by a group of authors over the AI company's alleged use of pirated books for AI training. The motion was filed in the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday, but details of the settlement have yet to be made public.
"This historic settlement will benefit all class members," Justin Nelson, lawyer for the authors, said in a statement. "We look forward to announcing details of the settlement in the coming weeks.
Authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson sued Anthropic last year. They accused Anthropic of training its AI models on pirated versions of their copyrighted books.
In June, Judge William Alsup partly sided with Anthropic, stating that its use of copyrighted books to train AI models qualified as fair use since the output was "exceedingly transformative" and not a substitute for the original works. However, he allowed the authors to pursue a trial on how Anthropic obtained the books. "Anthropic had no entitlement to use pirated copies," he said.
Anthropic purchased paperback copies of books, scanned and digitized their contents, and then destroyed the printed originals. But it also downloaded millions of unauthorized copies of books from online troves of pirated works to speed up training Claude and retained those copies.
As Wired reports, the trial was set to begin in December. Since Anthropic had downloaded pirated copies of millions of books, losing the trial would have cost them billions or maybe even a trillion dollars. The settlement agreement is now expected to be completed by Sept. 3.
Anthropic is just one among the many AI companies accused of copyright violations. News Corp. is suing Perplexity for substituting and repackaging its work. PCMag's parent, Ziff Davis, has also filed a lawsuit against OpenAI after it found ChatGPT had "relentlessly reproduced exact copies and created derivatives" of its articles.