Sept 25 (Reuters) - A federal judge in California on

Thursday preliminarily approved a landmark settlement of a

copyright class action brought by a group of authors against

artificial intelligence company Anthropic over the use of their

work in its AI training, according to a press release from the

authors' representatives.

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.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup called the proposed

class-action settlement fair during a hearing on Thursday,

according to the release.

Alsup had

declined to approve

the settlement earlier this month and asked the parties to

address his additional concerns.