Simon Willison’s Weblog

Anthropic to pay $1.5 billion to authors in landmark AI settlement. I wrote about the details of this case when it was found that Anthropic's training on book content was fair use, but they needed to have purchased individual copies of the books first... and they had seeded their collection with pirated ebooks from Books3, PiLiMi and LibGen.

The remaining open question from that case was the penalty for pirating those 500,000 books. That question has now been resolved in a settlement:

Anthropic has reached an agreement to pay “at least” a staggering $1.5 billion, plus interest, to authors to settle its class-action lawsuit. The amount breaks down to smaller payouts expected to be approximately $3,000 per book or work.

It's wild to me that a $1.5 billion settlement can feel like a win for Anthropic, but given that it's undisputed that they downloaded pirated books (as did Meta and likely many other research teams) the maximum allowed penalty was $150,000 per book, so $3,000 per book is actually a significant discount.

As far as I can tell this case sets a precedent for Anthropic's more recent approach of buying millions of (mostly used) physical books and destructively scanning them for training as covered by "fair use". I'm not sure if other in-flight legal cases will find differently.

To be clear: it appears it is legal, at least in the USA, to buy a used copy of a physical book (used = the author gets nothing), chop the spine off, scan the pages, discard the paper copy and then train on the scanned content. The transformation from paper to scan is "fair use".

If this does hold it's going to be a great time to be a bulk retailer of used books!