*

Settlement largest publicly reported copyright recovery in

history, plaintiffs say

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Anthropic to destroy downloaded books, may face future

infringement claims

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Fair-use debate continues in other AI copyright cases,

Meta case

ongoing

By Blake Brittain and Mike Scarcella

Sept 5 (Reuters) - Anthropic told a San Francisco

federal judge on Friday that it has agreed to pay $1.5 billion

to settle a class-action lawsuit from a group of authors who

accused the artificial intelligence company of using their books

to train its AI chatbot Claude without permission.

Anthropic and the plaintiffs in a court filing asked U.S.

District Judge William Alsup to approve the settlement, after

announcing the agreement in August without disclosing the terms

or amount.

"If approved, this landmark settlement will be the largest

publicly reported copyright recovery in history, larger than any

other copyright class action settlement or any individual

copyright case litigated to final judgment," the plaintiffs said

in the filing.

The proposed deal marks the first settlement in a string of

lawsuits against tech companies including OpenAI, Microsoft ( MSFT )

and Meta Platforms ( META ) over their use of

copyrighted material to train generative AI systems.

Anthropic as part of the settlement said it will destroy

downloaded copies of books the authors accused it of pirating,

and under the deal it could still face infringement claims

related to material produced by the company's AI models.

In a statement, Anthropic said the company is "committed to

developing safe AI systems that help people and organizations

extend their capabilities, advance scientific discovery, and

solve complex problems." The agreement does not include an

admission of liability.

Writers Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson

filed the class action against Anthropic last year. They argued

that the company, which is backed by Amazon ( AMZN ) and

Alphabet, unlawfully used millions of pirated books to

teach its AI assistant Claude to respond to human prompts.

The writers' allegations echoed dozens of other lawsuits

brought by authors, news outlets, visual artists and others who

say that tech companies stole their work to use in AI training.

The companies have argued their systems make fair use of

copyrighted material to create new, transformative content.

Alsup ruled in 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 that purpose.

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.

The pivotal fair-use question is still being debated in other AI

copyright cases. Another San Francisco judge hearing a similar

ongoing lawsuit against Meta ruled shortly after Alsup's

decision that using copyrighted work without permission to train

AI would be unlawful in "many circumstances."