Anthropic Pays $1.5B as Artists Win AI Copyright Cases
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- Anthropic was found to have violated copyright law by using pirated ebooks to train Claude and agreed to pay $1.5 billion — the largest copyright settlement ever — and destroy its pirated ebook trove.
- Judge William Alsup ruled that Anthropic's use of legally purchased books under "Project Panama" qualified as fair use as "quintessentially transformative," though lead plaintiff Andrea Bartz said she "strongly disagreed."
- Google faces a lawsuit from musician Sam Kogon over its Lyria AI music engine, with plaintiffs arguing the company violated its own YouTube terms of service by using Content ID data to train Lyria and ProducerAI.
- The Kadrey v. Meta lawsuit saw a judge dismiss initial claims for lack of market harm evidence, but narrower copyright and piracy claims remain active as comedian Sarah Silverman and authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey press ahead.
- Illustrators Sarah Andersen, Karla Ortiz, and Kelly McKernan filed a January 2023 class action against Stability, Midjourney, DeviantArt, and Runway AI — one of the earliest suits against generative image generators, filed just months after ChatGPT's debut.
- Author Kirk Wallace Johnson, who joined Susman Godfrey's case against Anthropic, argued the real threat is to working-class creators: "AI could never write The Godfather, but AI could write a mediocre film," and millions of writers live in that space.
- Plaintiffs and lawyers told The Verge that public opinion and courts are "leaning our way," but all expressed concern that legal wins may not be enough to protect creators' livelihoods as AI floods the market.
Why it matters: Independent artists and the creative working class are the most exposed to AI displacement, and even the $1.5 billion Anthropic settlement sets a precedent for holding AI companies accountable for pirated material — but the fair use carve-out for legally acquired books means companies still have a major escape hatch for future training.
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