Judge Preliminarily Approves $1.5B Anthropic Copyright Settlement With Authors

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 and Meta Platforms 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.

(Reporting by Blake Brittain in Washington; Editing by Leslie Adler, Alexia Garamfalvi and Chris Reese)