AI copyright showdown: Apple sued after Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement

A new lawsuit filed by a group of authors against tech giant Apple on Friday underscores the growing legal pressure on the artificial intelligence (AI) industry, as AI startup Anthropic announced a landmark $1.5 billion settlement over similar claims.

The class-action lawsuit, filed in a California federal court, accuses Apple of illegally using authors' copyrighted books to train its AI systems without permission or compensation. The plaintiffs include authors Grady Hendrix and Jennifer Roberson.

In a separate court filing on the same day, Anthropic disclosed it had reached an agreement to pay $1.5 billion to settle a class-action lawsuit from a group of authors who accused the company of pirating millions of books to train its Claude chatbot.

Lawyers for the authors called the Anthropic settlement the largest copyright recovery in history and the first of its kind in the AI era. The agreement, which does not include an admission of liability, sends a clear message to the tech industry that using copyrighted material from pirate websites is unacceptable.

The settlement fund amounts to $3,000 for each of 500,000 downloaded books, a figure that could grow as more works are identified. As part of the deal, Anthropic has also agreed to destroy the pirated book copies.

The Anthropic settlement provides a powerful precedent, suggesting that authors and creators have a strong legal basis to demand compensation and accountability from tech companies.

Lawsuits against other major companies, including OpenAI, Microsoft and Meta Platforms, are also ongoing, with creators arguing that their work has been stolen to create new, profitable AI models.

(With input from Reuters)