Synopsis
Nearly 120,000 authors and other copyright holders are seeking a share of a $1.5 billion class-action settlement with Anthropic over the company's unauthorised use of their books in artificial-intelligence training, according to a filing in California federal court.Listen to this article in summarized format
Claims have been filed for 91% of the more than 480,000 works covered by the settlement, according to a court filing in the case on Thursday. A judge will consider whether to grant final approval to the settlement - the largest ever in a US copyright case - at a hearing next month.
Anthropic was the first and remains the only major AI company to settle a US class-action by copyright holders alleging AI platforms used their work without permission to train their systems. A lead attorney for the authors pointed to the high proportion of claims filed as a sign of the case's success.
"This claims rate is another reason why this settlement is so historic and demonstrates the overwhelming support of the class,Justin Nelson of Susman Godfrey told Reuters on Friday.
The median claim rate for consumer class actions in the United States is 9%, according to a from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.
The settlement has also spurred objections from some authors who have argued it is not large enough, overcompensates the plaintiffs' attorneys or wrongly excludes some foreign copyright owners.
Spokespeople for Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday.
The authors in 2024, arguing that the company, which is backed by Amazon and Alphabet, used pirated versions of their books without permission or compensation to teach Claude to respond to human prompts.
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 US case to settle.
U.S. District Judge William Alsup 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 ranging into the hundreds of billions of dollars.
Anthropic agreed to the settlement last year. US District Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin is scheduled to hold a hearing on May 14 to decide whether to give it her final approval. As part of the settlement, law firms Susman Godfrey and Lieff Cabraser have requested 12.5% of the settlement fund, or $187.5 million, in attorneys' fees. The firms reduced their request after Alsup pushed back on the $300 million they initially sought in December.
