Anthropic Settles Historic Class-Action Lawsuit From Authors

Anthropic recently reached a preliminary settlement in a class-action lawsuit filed by US authors who claimed the company illegally trained its Claude large language model (LLM) on copyrighted works, according to an August 26 court filing.

Authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson initially filed the lawsuit against Anthropic in 2024, claiming that the company had broken copyright law by training Claude on their books and inviting other authors to join the class. Press outlets like Wired called this one of the most important AI lawsuits in history.

On June 23rd, the case suffered a significant setback when Judge William Alsup ruled that AI training fell under “fair use” and therefore did not constitute copyright breach. Under US law, the use of copyrighted materials is permitted so long as it’s determined to be “transformative,” meaning that it does not meaningfully substitute the original work.

“The technology at issue was among the most transformative many of us will see in our lifetimes,” Alsup wrote.

However, Anthropic was also found to have downloaded the books for free through illegal online libraries, which meant that the authors could still sue the company over piracy.

In the US, statutory damages for each pirated work start at $750. Anthropic likely used a library of about 7 million works to train Claude, meaning that a negative court outcome would have almost certainly bankrupted the company.

“This historic settlement will benefit all class members. We look forward to announcing details of the settlement in the coming weeks,” said Justin Nelson, one of the lawyers representing the authors, in a statement. So far, Anthropic has not commented on the settlement or its terms.

Several other major AI companies have been facing similar lawsuits from a variety of different plaintiffs. Last year, a group of prominent news outlets sued OpenAI for similar reasons, and just in June, media giants like Disney and Universal filed a joint lawsuit against Midjourney over its use of proprietary images and characters.

At the time of writing, there is no further information regarding the amount or details of the settlement.