Anthropic Agrees To Pay Record $1.5 Billion To Settle Authors' AI Lawsuit (deadline.com)
- Reference: 0179034190
- News link: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/09/05/1941245/anthropic-agrees-to-pay-record-15-billion-to-settle-authors-ai-lawsuit
- Source link: https://deadline.com/2025/09/anthropic-ai-lawsuit-settlement-1-5-billion-1236509423/
> Anthropic has [1]agreed to pay at least $1.5 billion into a class action fund as part of a [2]settlement of litigation brought by a group of book authors. The sum, disclosed in a court filing on Friday, "will be the largest publicly reported copyright recovery in history, larger than any other copyright class action settlement or any individual copyright case litigated to final judgment," the attorneys for the authors wrote.
>
> The settlement also includes a provision that releases Anthropic only for its conduct up the August 25, meaning that new claims could be filed over future conduct, according to the filing. Anthropic also has agreed to destroy the datasets used in its models. The settlement figure amounts to about $3,000 per class work, according to the filing.
You can read the terms of Anthropic's copyright settlement [3]here (PDF). A hearing in the case is scheduled for Sept. 8.
[1] https://deadline.com/2025/09/anthropic-ai-lawsuit-settlement-1-5-billion-1236509423/
[2] https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/07/17/1548245/judge-allows-nationwide-class-action-against-anthropic-over-alleged-piracy-of-7-million-books-for-ai-training
[3] https://deadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/anthropic3_Redacted.pdf
This is the new business model (Score:2)
Write crap books. "publish" them and then collect big time on the copyright infringement.
Regardless of the ethics of AI, this is very difficult news for the rest of us when the collection for copyright violation far outstrips the commercial value of the materials.
Other background (Score:2)
[1]https://www.theatlantic.com/te... [theatlantic.com]
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2023/09/books3-database-generative-ai-training-copyright-infringement/675363/
Re: (Score:2)
[1]https://tnq.ca/story/welcome-t... [tnq.ca]
Welcome to this Issue
By Pamela Mulloy
In the midst of copy editing the material for this issue I read “These 183,000 Books are Fueling the Biggest Fight in Publishing and Tech” by Alex Reisner in The Atlantic. The article outlines how big tech companies are using the published work of writers to train generative AI systems, and the fact that this work is being scooped up without permission has the writing community up in arms. The list of writers whose work has be
[1] https://tnq.ca/story/welcome-to-this-issue-70/
Hang on - I'm an AI... (Score:2)
If I follow the PDF link, is that another $3,000 ?
Downloading bad, training good! (Score:2)
Anthropic wouldn't have gotten into any trouble at all with this if they hadn't torrented a metric shit ton of books. If they had simply purchased a copy of each one second hand, they would have been clear training their models on those.
Datasets (Score:2)
Why would they destroy their datasets? The settlement should have covered the purchase price for those materials.
Chinese models don't have to pay (Score:2)
US model has to pay $1.5bn and also can no longer use the books. Chinese models have to pay $0 and can use the knowledge from all the books. This seems lopsided.
I guess we could switch to a planned economy (Score:2)
We are halfway there to the dictatorship. We could do the whole mix of corporation and government. I think there's a name for that. Starts with the letter f I think....
Anyway let the Chinese have their AI. The only thing it seems good for is taking low level jobs and all that's going to do is create a fuck ton of social unrest we don't need. They can deal with the tens of millions of completely unemployable people in a "communist" Nation if they want.