Overview

• U.S. District Judge William Alsup approved the agreement on a preliminary basis in San Francisco after requiring revisions to the notice and claims setup.
• The settlement would pay roughly $3,000 per covered title for nearly half a million books and excludes future works.
• Anthropic agreed to destroy datasets that allegedly contained pirated material used in developing its AI systems.
• Alsup pressed for safeguards to ensure broad, fair notification and flagged concerns about potential behind-the-scenes pressure by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers.
• A June ruling in the case found training on lawfully obtained books could be fair use but faulted Anthropic’s acquisition of pirated copies, and the payout would rank as the largest publicly reported copyright recovery, according to CNBC.