AI startup Anthropic will pay a $1.5 billion settlement after being accused of copyright violations and piracy by illegally downloading books to train its AI's language models.

The release of Open AI's ChatGPT has accelerated the development of artificial intelligence and warnings about its impact on society.

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AI company Anthropic has agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a lawsuit brought by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, who accused the company of copyright infringement and piracy. The authors alleged that Anthropic downloaded and used pirated versions of over 7 million books to train its AI models. 

While the court found Anthropic's use of the material to be fair use under copyright law, it ruled that obtaining the books from a shadow library constituted piracy. The settlement avoids potentially much larger penalties under U.S. copyright law, which could have reached over a trillion dollars. Legal experts note that while settlements do not set precedent, the fair use argument is likely to feature in future AI copyright cases.

Anthropic will pay out $1.5B to settle allegations of book piracy

AI startup Anthropic paying up $1.5 billion after being accused of copyright violations and piracy. I believe this case will be known by its first name to law students for a long time. Well-known authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graber and Kirk Wallace Johnson sued the company over what their lawyer calls quote brazen infringement. They alleged according to the complaint that Anthropic downloaded known pirated versions of the works, made copies of them and fed those pirated copies into its models to train them. And they took over 7 million books. That's a lot of books. Nuvel Gonzalo specializes in corporate law covering intellectual property and copyright. Anthropic is arguing, no, this was a transformative work under copyright law and transformative just means that the final product is completely different. But then the authors argue, but it was our work that created it. The judge ultimately sided with Anthropic on the copyright issue, finding the company's usage counted as quote fair use and therefore was legal. But he also ruled that downloading them from a shadow library constituted piracy. Under U.S. copyright law, damages start at $750 per infringed work, meaning Anthropic could have faced more than a trillion dollars in penalties. Settlements don't technically set legal precedent, but can we expect to see this fair use argument used in future AI and copyright cases? Absolutely. A lot of people want to make new law just for AI, but the old laws, they work in this case. This is just standard copyright violation of unlawful copying or buying pirated material.

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Anthropic will pay out $1.5B to settle allegations of book piracy

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