HomeAnthropic's Copyright Settlement Draws Ire from Writers
Approximately half a million authors stand to receive payments of at least $3,000 each, stemming from a historic $1.5 billion class-action settlement between a group of writers and Anthropic.
While this landmark agreement represents the largest payout in U.S. copyright history, it is not a triumph for authors—it is another victory for the technology sector.
Technology companies are aggressively compiling vast troves of written material to train the large language models that drive innovative AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude. These same tools threaten creative professions, despite often producing bland content. AI systems become more advanced by consuming more data, but after scouring nearly the entire internet, these firms are effectively exhausting the supply of new information.
This scarcity led Anthropic, the creator of Claude, to illegally obtain millions of books from "shadow libraries" for AI training. The lawsuit, Bartz v. Anthropic, is among numerous legal actions against companies such as Meta, Google, OpenAI, and Midjourney concerning the use of copyrighted works to train AI.
However, the settlement compensates writers not for their work being used to train AI, but because Anthropic unlawfully downloaded books instead of purchasing them—a mere financial penalty for a company that recently secured an additional $13 billion in funding.
In June, U.S. District Judge William Alsup ruled in favor of Anthropic, stating that training AI on copyrighted material is legal. The judge deemed this application sufficiently "transformative" to qualify as fair use, a copyright exception that has not been revised since 1976.
"Similar to an aspiring writer learning from existing works, Anthropic's large language models were trained not to copy or replace those works, but to diverge and generate something new," Judge Alsup explained.
It was the act of piracy—not the AI training itself—that prompted Judge Alsup to allow the case to proceed. With Anthropic's settlement, a trial is now unnecessary.
"If approved, today's settlement resolves the plaintiffs' outstanding legacy claims," stated Aparna Sridhar, Anthropic's deputy general counsel. "We continue our commitment to building safe AI systems that enhance human capabilities, drive scientific progress, and address complex challenges."
As numerous other lawsuits regarding AI and copyright make their way through the courts, judges may now cite Bartz v. Anthropic as a precedent. Given the significant implications of these rulings, however, future judges could reach different conclusions.
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Approximately half a million authors stand to receive payments of at least $3,000 each, stemming from a historic $1.5 billion class-action settlement between a group of writers and Anthropic.
While this landmark agreement represents the largest payout in U.S. copyright history, it is not a triumph for authors—it is another victory for the technology sector.
Technology companies are aggressively compiling vast troves of written material to train the large language models that drive innovative AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude. These same tools threaten creative professions, despite often producing bland content. AI systems become more advanced by consuming more data, but after scouring nearly the entire internet, these firms are effectively exhausting the supply of new information.
This scarcity led Anthropic, the creator of Claude, to illegally obtain millions of books from "shadow libraries" for AI training. The lawsuit, Bartz v. Anthropic, is among numerous legal actions against companies such as Meta, Google, OpenAI, and Midjourney concerning the use of copyrighted works to train AI.
However, the settlement compensates writers not for their work being used to train AI, but because Anthropic unlawfully downloaded books instead of purchasing them—a mere financial penalty for a company that recently secured an additional $13 billion in funding.
In June, U.S. District Judge William Alsup ruled in favor of Anthropic, stating that training AI on copyrighted material is legal. The judge deemed this application sufficiently "transformative" to qualify as fair use, a copyright exception that has not been revised since 1976.
"Similar to an aspiring writer learning from existing works, Anthropic's large language models were trained not to copy or replace those works, but to diverge and generate something new," Judge Alsup explained.
It was the act of piracy—not the AI training itself—that prompted Judge Alsup to allow the case to proceed. With Anthropic's settlement, a trial is now unnecessary.
"If approved, today's settlement resolves the plaintiffs' outstanding legacy claims," stated Aparna Sridhar, Anthropic's deputy general counsel. "We continue our commitment to building safe AI systems that enhance human capabilities, drive scientific progress, and address complex challenges."
As numerous other lawsuits regarding AI and copyright make their way through the courts, judges may now cite Bartz v. Anthropic as a precedent. Given the significant implications of these rulings, however, future judges could reach different conclusions.
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