Anthropic settles AI copyright lawsuit with book authors
Artificial intelligence company Anthropic and a group of book authors settled a copyright infringement lawsuit.
Justin Nelson, the lawyer representing the book authors, said it is a "historic settlement [that] will benefit all class members".
The terms of the proposed class settlement will be finalised next week, according to a federal appeals court ruling filed on Tuesday. Anthropic declined to comment on the deal.
US District Judge William Alsup ruled in June that Anthropic didn’t break the law by training its chatbot Claude on millions of copyrighted books.
However, the company was scheduled to go to trial over how it acquired those books by downloading them from online “shadow libraries” of pirated copies.
Alsup said in the June ruling that the AI system’s distilling of thousands of written works to be able to produce its own passages of text qualified as “fair use” under US copyright law because it was “quintessentially transformative”.
“Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic’s (AI large language models) trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them — but to turn a hard corner and create something different,” Alsup wrote.
Anthropic is facing other copyright-related legal challenges, including from Universal Music Group. It alleges that Anthropic illegally trained its AI programs on copyrighted lyrics.
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