(Reuters) -Anthropic told a San Francisco federal judge on Friday that it has agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit from a group of authors who accused the artificial intelligence company of using their books to train its AI chatbot Claude without permission.
The plaintiffs in a court filing asked U.S. District Judge William Alsup to approve the settlement, after announcing the agreement in August without disclosing the terms or amount.
"This settlement sends a powerful message to AI companies and creators alike that taking copyrighted works from these pirate websites is wrong,” the authors' lawyers said in a statement. They called it the largest copyright recovery in history and the first of its kind in the artificial intelligence era.
The proposed deal marks the first settlement in a string of lawsuits against tech companies including OpenAI, Microsoft and Meta Platforms over their use of copyrighted material to train generative AI systems.
Anthropic as part of the settlement said it will destroy downloaded copies of books the authors accused it of pirating, and under the deal it could still face infringement claims related to material produced by the company's AI models.
The $1.5 billion settlement fund amounts to $3,000 for 500,000 downloaded books, and it could grow if more works are identified.
In a statement, Anthropic said the company is "committed to developing safe AI systems that help people and organizations extend their capabilities, advance scientific discovery, and solve complex problems." The agreement does not include an admission of liability.
Writers Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson filed the class action against Anthropic last year. They argued that the company, which is backed by Amazon and Alphabet, unlawfully used millions of pirated books to teach its AI assistant Claude to respond to human prompts.
The writers' allegations echoed dozens of other lawsuits brought by authors, news outlets, visual artists and others who say that tech companies stole their work to use in AI training.
The companies have argued their systems make fair use of copyrighted material to create new, transformative content.
Alsup ruled in June that Anthropic made fair use of the authors' work to train Claude, but found that the company violated their rights by saving more than 7 million pirated books to a "central library" that would not necessarily be used for that purpose.
A trial was scheduled to begin in December to determine how much Anthropic owed for the alleged piracy, with potential damages ranging into the hundreds of billions of dollars.
Mary Rasenberger, CEO of writers advocacy group the Authors Guild, in a statement on Friday called the settlement “a vital step in acknowledging that AI companies cannot simply steal authors’ creative work to build their AI.”
The pivotal fair-use question is still being debated in other AI copyright cases. Another San Francisco judge hearing a similar ongoing lawsuit against Meta ruled shortly after Alsup's decision that using copyrighted work without permission to train AI would be unlawful in "many circumstances."
(Reporting by Blake Brittain and Mike Scarcella in Washington; Editing by David Bario, Lisa Shumaker and Matthew Lewis)
