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 amount is well below what Anthropic may have had to pay if it had lost the case at trial. Experts said the plaintiffs may have been awarded at least billions of dollars in damages, with some estimates placing the total figure over 1 trillion. It is the first of its kind in the AI era. Anthropic is not admitting any wrongdoing or liability. "Today's settlement, if approved, will resolve the plaintiffs' remaining legacy claims. We remain committed to developing safe AI systems that help people and organizations extend their capabilities, advance scientific discovery, and solve complex problems," Anthropic deputy general counsel Aparna Sridhar said in a statement.

The move will allow Anthropic to avoid what could have been a financially devastating outcome in court. The settlement agreement is expected to be finalized September 3, with more details to follow, according to a legal filing published on Tuesday. Lawyers for the plaintiffs did not immediately respond to requests for comment. In 2024, three book writers, Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, sued Anthropic, alleging that the startup illegally used their work to train its artificial intelligence models. In June, California district court judge William Alsup issued a summary judgment in Bartz v. Anthropic that largely sided with Anthropic, finding that the company's usage of the books was "fair use" and thus legal.

On the other side, plaintiffs range from individual artists and authors to large companies like Getty and the New York Times. The outcomes of these cases are set to have an enormous impact on the future of AI. In effect, they will decide whether or not model makers can continue ordering up a free lunch. If not, they will need to start paying for such training data via new kinds of licensing deals--or find new ways to train their models. And that's why last week's wins for the technology companies matter. If you drill into the details, the rulings are less cut-and-dried than they seem at first.

Judge Vince Chhabria sided with Meta but appeared to do so regretfully, stating that Meta's use of the writers' work to train its bots isn't necessarily legal but that the plaintiffs "made the wrong arguments."

He concluded that the plaintiffs did not present sufficient evidence that Meta's use of their books was harmful.

A United States federal judge has ruled that the company Anthropic made "fair use" of the books it utilised to train artificial intelligence (AI) tools without the permission of the authors. The favourable ruling comes at a time when the impacts of AI are being discussed by regulators and policymakers, and the industry is using its political influence to push for a loose regulatory framework. "Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic's LLMs [large language models] trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them -- but to turn a hard corner and create something different," US District Judge William Alsup said. A group of authors had filed a class-action lawsuit alleging that Anthropic's use of their work to train its chatbot, Claude, without their consent was illegal. He accepted Anthropic's claim that the AI's output was "exceedingly transformative" and therefore fell under the "fair use" protections.

"The training use was a fair use," senior district judge William Alsup wrote in a summary judgement order released late Monday evening. "The technology at issue was among the most transformative many of us will see in our lifetimes," Alsup wrote. "Judge Alsup found that training an LLM is transformative use--even when there is significant memorization. He specifically rejected the argument that what humans do when reading and memorizing is different in kind from what computers do when training an LLM." Anthropic is the first artificial intelligence company to win this kind of battle, but the victory comes with a large asterisk attached. While Alsup found that Anthropic's training was fair use, he ruled that the authors could take Anthropic to trial over pirating their works.

If you have several Google Nest speakers, Chromecast and smart displays, you can add each of them to several different groups in the Google Home app again. The company implemented changes last month, which would allow certain devices to be added to only one speaker group at a time in response to Sonos' patent lawsuit. This development, announced by the Nest team, undoes that change. If you'll recall, Sonos sued the company back in 2020, accusing it of infringing on several patents it holds, including ones related to managing groups of speakers. In May, a California federal jury determined that Google had infringed on Sonos' intellectual property and ordered the tech giant to pay a $32.5 million fine.

A former Google engineer has been sentenced to 18 months in prison after pleading guilty to stealing trade secrets before joining Uber's effort to build robotic vehicles for its ride-hailing service. The sentence handed down Tuesday by U.S. District Judge William Alsup came more than four months after former Google engineer Anthony Levandowski reached a plea agreement with the federal prosecutors who brought a criminal case against him last August. Levandowski, who helped steer Google's self-driving car project before landing at Uber, was also ordered to pay more than $850,000. Alsup had taken the unusual step of recommending the Justice Department open a criminal investigation into Levandowski while presiding over a high-profile civil trial between Uber and Waymo, a spinoff from a self-driving car project that Google began in 2007 after hiring Levandowski to be part of its team. Levandowski eventually became disillusioned with Google and left the company in early 2016 to start his own self-driving truck company, called Otto, which Uber eventually bought for $680 million. He wound up pleading guilty to one count, culminating in Tuesday's sentencing.