Anthropic: over a billion for pirated books for AI

The landmark agreement could mark a turning point in the legal battles between AI companies and writers, visual artists, and other creative professionals, who accuse them of copyright infringement.

The US company agreed to pay authors and publishers around $3,000 (€2,560) for each of the approximately 500,000 books covered by the agreement, which puts an end to a class action lawsuit.

"From what we can tell, this is the largest copyright recovery ever recorded," said Justin Nelson, the authors' attorney. "It's the first of its kind in the AI ​​era," he added.

A trio of authors — thriller novelist Andrea Bartz and nonfiction writers Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson — filed a lawsuit in 2024.

The lawsuit eventually attracted a larger group of writers and publishers, who accused Anthropic of downloading pirated copies of their books to train its AI model, "Claude."

A federal judge issued a mixed ruling on the case in June, concluding that using copyrighted books to train AI models was not illegal, but that Anthropic improperly acquired millions of books through pirated websites.

Experts say losing the case, after a trial scheduled for December, could have cost the company even more money.

“We were looking at a strong possibility of several billion dollars, enough to potentially cripple or even drive Anthropic out of business,” said William Long, a legal analyst at consulting firm Wolters Kluwer.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup in San Francisco — where Anthropic is headquartered — has scheduled a hearing for Monday to review the terms of the settlement.

Anthropic said in a statement Friday that the settlement “will resolve the plaintiffs’ remaining claims.”

"We remain committed to developing safe AI systems that help people and organizations expand their capabilities, advance scientific discovery, and solve complex problems," said the company's deputy general counsel, Aparna Sridhar.

Founded in 2021 by former OpenAI employees, Anthropic launched “Claude” in early 2023 and claims to have more than 300,000 enterprise customers.

The company also indicated that it had almost sevenfold increased the number of users, with the potential to generate more than $100,000 (€85,000) in annual revenue.

The startup recently announced that it had reached a valuation of $183 billion (€156 billion), following a new round of funding.