Tech news in 3 minutes
Anthropic’s landmark $1.5B copyright settlement is approved
**Anthropic Settles Landmark $1.5 Billion Copyright Lawsuit, But Fair Use Debate Continues** A federal judge has granted final approval to Anthropic’s landmark $1.5 billion settlement of a class action copyright lawsuit, allowing the AI lab to begin paying authors and publishers for using their copyrighted works without permission. The settlement, approved Monday by Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, resolves claims that Anthropic illegally downloaded and stored millions of copyrighted books to train its AI models. The payout will distribute $3,000 per work across approximately 500,000 works to rights holders. While the settlement is the largest in U.S. copyright history, the underlying legal question remains unresolved. The court sided with Anthropic on the core issue, ruling that training AI models on copyrighted text constitutes fair use—a decision widely seen as a turning point for the AI industry. However, the judge found that Anthropic’s method of obtaining books from pirate sites like Library Genesis was illegal, prompting the settlement to avoid a trial on damages. Because the case was settled, it will not reach an appeals court to set binding precedent, leaving other judges free to reach their own conclusions. The ruling does not settle the industry-wide legal question, as other lawsuits against Google, Meta, Midjourney, and OpenAI continue. Just last week, a group of publishers including Hachette, Cengage, and Elsevier filed a class action against Google over its use of copyrighted works to train its Gemini AI platform.