By Blake Brittain
May 14 (Reuters) – A federal judge on Thursday pressed lawyers for more information on several points of artificial intelligence company Anthropic’s proposed $1.5 billion settlement with authors who accused it of misusing their books to train its AI chatbot Claude.
U.S. District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin did not grant final approval at the hearing in San Francisco, instead asking for more detail on issues including lawyers’ fees and payments to lead plaintiffs in what is the largest known U.S. copyright settlement.
Now-retired Judge William Alsup initially greenlit the agreement last September.
The case is one of dozens brought by copyright owners including authors and news outlets against tech companies over the training of their large language models, and the first major U.S. case to settle.
Authors and other copyright holders filed claims covering over 92% of the more than 480,000 works included in the settlement, an attorney for the authors said during the hearing. The settlement has spurred objections from authors who have argued it is not large enough, overcompensates the plaintiffs’ attorneys or wrongly excludes some copyright owners.
The writers sued Anthropic in 2024, arguing that the company, which is backed by Amazon and Alphabet, used pirated versions of their books without permission to teach Claude to respond to human prompts.
Alsup ruled last June that Anthropic made fair use of the authors’ work to train Claude, but found that the company violated their rights by saving more than 7 million pirated books to a “central library” that would not necessarily be used for AI training. A trial was scheduled to begin in December to determine how much Anthropic owed for the alleged piracy, with potential damages running into the hundreds of billions of dollars.
Some authors and publishers making similar claims have filed separate lawsuits against Anthropic that are still ongoing. A group of more than 25 writers who opted out of the settlement, including Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, filed a new complaint against Anthropic in California on Wednesday.
(Reporting by Blake Brittain in Washington, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Sanjeev Miglani)
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