AI giant Anthropic to pay $1.5 bn over pirated books

Anthropic will pay at least $1.5 billion to settle a US class action lawsuit over pirated books allegedly used to train its artificial intelligence (AI) models, according to court documents filed Friday.

“This settlement sends a strong message to the AI industry that there are serious consequences when they pirate authors’ works to train their AI, robbing those least able to afford it,” said Mary Rasenberger, CEO of the Authors Guild, in a statement supporting the deal.

The settlement stems from a class-action lawsuit filed by authors Andrea…