Anthropic has agreed to pay at least US$1.5 billion to settle a class action lawsuit with a group of authors in the US District Court for the Northern District of California.

The authors accused the AI startup of illegally using their books to train its models.

The proposed settlement includes about US$3,000 per book plus interest and requires Anthropic to destroy datasets containing the disputed material.

If approved, this would be the largest publicly reported copyright settlement to date.

A judge previously ruled that Anthropic’s use of books for training qualified as “fair use,” but the trial was set to examine whether its data sources, Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror, constituted copyright infringement.

The lawsuit was filed in 2024 by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson.

Earlier this week, Anthropic said it closed a US$13 billion funding round, valuing the company at US$183 billion.

🔗 Source: CNBC

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