Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5 billion to settle authors' copyright lawsuit

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Anthropic has agreed to wage astatine slightest $1.5 cardinal to settee a people enactment lawsuit with a radical of authors, who claimed the artificial intelligence startup had illegally accessed their books.

The institution volition wage astir $3,000 per publication positive interest, and agreed to destruct the datasets containing the allegedly pirated material, according to a filing connected Friday.

The suit against Anthropic has been intimately watched by AI startups and media companies that person been trying to find what copyright infringement means successful the AI era. If Anthropic's colony is approved, it volition beryllium the largest publically reported copyright betterment successful history, according to the filing.

"This colony sends a almighty connection to AI companies and creators alike that taking copyrighted works from these pirate websites is wrong," Justin Nelson, the lawyer for the plaintiffs, told CNBC successful a statement.

Anthropic did not instantly respond to CNBC's petition for comment.

The lawsuit, filed successful the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, was brought past twelvemonth by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson. The suit alleged that Anthropic had carried retired "largescale copyright infringement by downloading and commercially exploiting books that it obtained from allegedly pirated datasets," the filing said.

In June, a judge ruled that Anthropic's usage of books to bid its AI models was "fair use," but ordered a proceedings to measure whether the institution infringed connected copyright by obtaining works from the databases Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. The lawsuit was slated to proceed to proceedings successful December, according to Friday's filing.

Earlier this week, Anthropic said it closed a $13 cardinal backing circular that valued the institution astatine $183 billion. The financing was led by Iconiq, Fidelity Management and Lightspeed Venture Partners.