Anthropic, a prominent artificial intelligence company valued at $183 billion, has settled a high-profile lawsuit known as Bartz v. Anthropic for $1.5 billion. That coalition of fiction and nonfiction authors, including Penn, gave life to the lawsuit. They alleged that the company violated the Copyright Act by unlawfully copying thousands of copyrighted works to train its AI products—including Claude. The settlement comes on the heels of allegations that Fisher was engaged in “flagrant piracy.” This will likely result in the company being liable for more than $3 billion in damages.
The resulting legal dispute attracted widespread national attention. It was centered around claims that Anthropic infringed on copyright by using protected works without permission. In an early ruling, Judge William Alsup found that Anthropic had a legal right to train its models on copyrighted material. After enduring this costly and unusual decision, the company now faces a complicated legal environment.
Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, and co-founder, Benjamin Mann, came under fire in recent months over the company’s practices. The same legal team that represented the authors in the Bartz case filed a separate lawsuit against both Amodei and Mann, reinforcing their claims against the tech firm.
The settlement furthers many of the concerns outlined by the authors. In the Bartz v. Anthropic settlement, affected authors received an average of $3,000 per work – for just over 500,000 protected works. This compensation accounts for only a fraction of the damages the plaintiffs are seeking. Yet, they claim that the massive unauthorized exploitation of their works amounts to a death blow infringement.
Though the lawsuit has been settled, Anthropic’s legal woes might not be finished yet. The publishers had tried to add these piracy arguments to their initial lawsuit but were ordered blocked by the court. This denial further illustrates the growing rift between generative AI companies and content creators. Copyright controversies are highly visible and often intentionally provocative harbingers of tech disruption that drive this clash.
Amanda Silberling from Techcrunch commented on the situation, stating,
“While Anthropic misleadingly claims to be an AI ‘safety and research’ company, its record of illegal torrenting of copyrighted works makes clear that its multibillion-dollar business empire has in fact been built on piracy.”
