A US federal court has approved Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement in a class-action lawsuit during which authors accused the AI company of using their books without permission to coach the AI model Claude. That is the biggest such settlement to this point in a US copyright case, in response to Reuters.
The dispute is one in every of several legal cases during which copyright holders sued AI corporations over how large language models (LLMs) were trained, and it’s the primary major AI-related copyright dispute within the US to be resolved through a settlement.
A judge had previously ruled that the actual training of AI models using books falls under the “fair use” doctrine in US copyright law. But Anthropic was found to have violated the law by storing greater than 7 million pirated books in a central library, no matter whether or not they were later used for AI training or not.