Anthropic, the company behind Claude AI, has agreed to pay at least $1.5 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit brought by authors over the use of pirated books in training its large language models. The proposed settlement, filed September 5, comes after months of litigation that could change how AI companies acquire and manage data for model training.
The class action was led by authors Andrea Barta, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, and accused Anthropic of downloading hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books from torrent-based sources like Library Genesis, Pirate Mirror, and Books3. They claim that doing so allowed the company to build Claude’s underlying dataset.
