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[TECHNOLOGY] · United States, United Kingdom, France, Indonesia, Spain · 4 sources

Anthropic to pay $1.5 billion to settle AI copyright lawsuit

Anthropic, the creator of the Claude AI model, has reached a settlement in the 'Bartz v. Anthropic PBC' class-action lawsuit. The company will pay approximately $1.5 billion to affected authors and nearly $19 million to publishers, including Bloomsbury Publishing, following allegations of using unauthorized works for AI training.

Court documents revealed a secretive operation dubbed 'Project Panama,' through which Anthropic allegedly acquired millions of books. The process involved using industrial equipment to cut the spines of books, scanning the pages at high speeds for digital training data, and subsequently destroying or recycling the physical copies. While the court ruled that training AI models on copyrighted material can be considered 'fair use' due to its transformative nature, the settlement specifically addresses the acquisition of pirated or unauthorized content.

Additional controversy involves ISBNdb, a bibliographic database that reportedly offered services to aggregate massive quantities of books for tech companies. ISBNdb has denied actually purchasing or destroying books, claiming its service was merely a market test. Reports from European booksellers also noted unusual large-scale orders for rare books in countries such as the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, and Switzerland.

Entities

Anthropic · Bartz v. Anthropic PBC · Bloomsbury Publishing · Claude · ISBNdb

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