The artificial intelligence company Anthropic has agreed to pay 1.5bn to settle a class-action lawsuit by book authors who say the company took pirated copies of their works to train its chatbot. The company has agreed to pay authors about 3,000 for each of an estimated 500,000 books covered by the settlement. "It is the first of its kind in the AI era." A trio of authors – thriller novelist Andrea Bartz and nonfiction writers Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson – sued last year and now represent a broader group of writers and publishers whose books Anthropic downloaded to train its chatbot Claude. If Anthropic had not settled, experts say losing the case after a scheduled December trial could have cost the San Francisco-based company even more money.

The artificial intelligence startup Anthropic said on Friday it had raised an additional 4bn investment from its longtime backer Amazon.com, Amazon will maintain its position as a minority investor, the company said. Its AWS unit will also be Anthropic's official cloud provider. Anthropic also said it was working with AWS's Annapurna Labs on the development of future generations of Amazon's Trainium chips and plans to train its foundational models on the hardware. Britain's competition regulator had said in September that Amazon's partnership with Anthropic will not be referred for a deeper inquiry as it did not fall under its jurisdiction.

Freelancer has accused Anthropic, the AI startup behind the Claude large language models, of ignoring its "do not crawl" robots.txt Meanwhile, iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens said Anthropic has ignored the website's policy prohibiting the use of its content for AI model training. Matt Barrie, the chief executive of Freelancer, told The Information that Anthropic's ClaudeBot is "the most aggressive scraper by far." His website allegedly got 3.5 million visits from the company's crawler within a span of four hours, which is "probably about five times the volume of the number two" AI crawler. Similarly, Wiens posted on X/Twitter that Anthropic's bot hit iFixit's servers a million times in 24 hours.

Amazon said on Wednesday it will pour an additional 2.75bn into Anthropic, bringing its total investment in the artificial intelligence startup to 4bn. The technology giant will maintain a minority stake in San Francisco-based Anthropic, a rival of ChatGPT maker OpenAI. "Generative AI is poised to be the most transformational technology of our time, and we believe our strategic collaboration with Anthropic will further improve our customers' experiences, and look forward to what's next," said Swami Sivasubramanian, vice-president of data and AI at Amazon Web Services, or AWS, Amazon's cloud-computing subsidiary. The Seattle-based tech giant made an initial investment of 1.25bn in Anthropic in September, and indicated then it had plans to invest up to 4bn. Get set for the working day – we'll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morning The two companies are collaborating to develop so-called foundation models, which underpin the generative AI systems that have captured global attention.

Google agreed to invest up to $2 billion in Anthropic, building on its earlier investment in the artificial-intelligence company and adding fuel to the race between startups trying to achieve the next big breakthrough in the emerging technology. Google invested $500 million upfront into the OpenAI rival and agreed to add $1.5 billion more over time, people familiar with the matter said. The investment follows a separate commitment Amazon made last month to invest $4 billion in the company, which was founded by former OpenAI engineers in 2021 with the goal of developing rival generative AI models.