Artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic told a California court that it has agreed to pay $1.5 billion (~RM 6.4 billion) to settle a class-action lawsuit by authors who claim their books were pirated to train Claude.
The class-action lawsuit was filed by Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson last year on behalf of authors whose work was used without permission. The $1.5 billion figure was reached with a $3,000 award for 500,000 books pirated by Anthropic.
This amount will increase if more books are discovered and there is another lawsuit for compensation for each offense committed by Claude using pirated books. Anthropic also agreed to destroy each of the pirated books.
In June, Anthropic was found not guilty of infringing on the intellectual property of the authors of the books to train the AI model because it fell under the category of fair use. But they are guilty of storing over 7,000,000 printed books in a central library without all of them being used to train AI models. The case is initially set to go to trial in December with Anthropic facing having to pay hundreds of billions in compensation to the authors.