Anthropic, an artificial intelligence startup, has reached a settlement in a class action lawsuit brought by a group of U.S. authors who alleged copyright infringement. In a legal document filed on Tuesday, the company announced a proposed class settlement that enables it to avoid a trial regarding claims that it utilized pirated works to train its AI models.
The details of the settlement remain unclear and arise from a lawsuit initiated last year by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson. The plaintiffs argued that Anthropic trained its Claude AI using an open-source dataset that allegedly contained pirated materials.
In June, Anthropic achieved a legal victory when Judge William Alsup ruled that training AI models on books purchased legally qualifies as fair use. However, he indicated that the possibility of further litigation still existed. Following this, Judge Alsup approved the class action lawsuit from the authors, which claimed that Anthropic engaged in what they described as “Napster-style downloading of millions of works.” The company was scheduled to go to trial over these piracy accusations in December, with potential penalties amounting to billions or even more than $1 trillion.
The settlement is anticipated to be finalized on September 3. Justin Nelson, an attorney representing the authors, commented that the settlement would provide benefits to all class members and indicated that further details would be shared in the upcoming weeks. Anthropic has not provided comments regarding the settlement.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/news/766311/anthropic-class-action-ai-piracy-authors-settlement