A federal judge in San Francisco is seeking more information on a proposed $1.5 billion settlement between artificial intelligence company Anthropic and authors who accused the company of misusing their books to train its AI chatbot Claude. U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin did not grant final approval at the hearing, asking for more details on issues such as lawyers’ fees and payments to lead plaintiffs. This settlement is the largest known U.S. copyright settlement.
The agreement was initially approved by now-retired Judge William Alsup last September. This case is one of many brought by copyright owners against tech companies over the training of large language models, and it is the first major U.S. case to settle. Authors and other copyright holders filed claims covering over 92% of the more than 480,000 works included in the settlement.
The writers sued Anthropic in 2024, alleging that the company used pirated versions of their books without permission to teach Claude to respond to human prompts. Alsup ruled that Anthropic made fair use of the authors’ work to train Claude but found that the company violated their rights by saving over 7 million pirated books to a “central library” that may not have been used for AI training. A trial was scheduled to determine the potential damages, which could have been in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
Some authors and publishers with similar claims have filed separate lawsuits against Anthropic that are ongoing. A group of more than 25 writers who opted out of the settlement, including Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, filed a new complaint against Anthropic in California.
This case highlights the ongoing legal challenges faced by tech companies in the realm of copyright and AI technology. The details of the settlement and the concerns raised by authors and copyright holders will continue to shape the landscape of intellectual property law in the digital age.
