Anthropic Agrees to $1.5 Billion Settlement for Downloading Pirated Books to Train AI

Anthropic has agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a lawsuit brought by authors and publishers over its use of millions of copyrighted books to train the models for its AI chatbot Claude, according to a legal filing posted online.

A federal judge found in June that Anthropic’s use of 7 million pirated books was protected under fair use but that holding the digital works in a “central library” violated copyright law. The judge ruled that executives at…