The AI startup Anthropic will pay $1.5 billion to book authors for piracy.

# AI startup Anthropic will pay $1.5 billion to authors for piracy

Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class action lawsuit by writers who claim the company stole their works to train AI models. This was reported by the BBC.

According to the plaintiffs' attorneys, the deal, which requires approval from U.S. District Judge William Alsup, will become the largest publicly announced intellectual property rights recovery in history.

In June, Alsup ruled that Anthropic did not violate the law by using books to train AI, but must stand trial for using pirated content.

The plaintiffs accused the defendant of creating a "central library of all the books in the world," while the works were illegally downloaded from pirate sites.

"The fact that the company later purchased a copy of the book that it had previously stolen from the internet does not absolve it of responsibility for the theft, but it may affect the amount of damages provided for by law," the judge wrote in the ruling.

The hearings in the case were supposed to continue in December.

The representatives of the authors called the achieved settlement "the first of its kind in the era of artificial intelligence," creating a legal precedent.

"This agreement sends a powerful signal to companies and creators of AI projects that using works protected by copyright from pirate sites is wrong," said attorney Justin Nelson.

Apple in the crosshairs

On Friday, writers Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Robertson filed a class-action lawsuit against Apple. They accused the tech corporation of illegally using their books to train AI systems.

According to the plaintiffs, Apple copied copyrighted works without their consent, attribution, or appropriate compensation. The company even "didn't attempt to pay" writers for their contributions to a "potentially profitable venture," the statement says.

Recall that in July, Disney and Universal accused the AI image generation startup Midjourney of stealing and copying their characters.