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.

Controversial facial recognition company Clearview AI has agreed to an unusual settlement to a class action lawsuit, The New York Times reports. Rather than paying cash, the company would provide a 23 percent stake in its company to any Americans in its database. Without the settlement, Clearview could go bankrupt, according to court documents. If you live in the US and have ever posted a photo of yourself publicly online, you may be part of the class action. The settlement could amount to at least 50 million according to court documents, It still must be approved by a federal judge.

Since the emergence of Midjourney and other image generators, artists have been watching and wondering whether AI is a great opportunity or an existential threat. Now, after a list of 16,000 names emerged of artists whose work Midjourney had allegedly used to train its AI – including Bridget Riley, Damien Hirst, Rachel Whiteread, Tracey Emin, David Hockney and Anish Kapoor – the art world has issued a call to arms against the technologists. British artists have contacted US lawyers to discuss joining a class action against Midjourney and other AI firms, while others have told the Observer that they may bring their own legal action in the UK. "What we need to do is come together," said Tim Flach, president of the Association of Photographers and an internationally acclaimed photographer whose name is on the list. "This public showing of this list of names is a great catalyst for artists to come together and challenge it. I personally would be up for doing that."

If these cases prove successful, they could force OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft, and others to change the way AI is built, trained, and deployed so that it is more fair and equitable. They could also create new ways for artists, authors, and others to be compensated for having their work used as training data for AI models, through a system of licensing and royalties. The generative AI boom has revived American politicians' enthusiasm for passing AI-specific laws. However, we're unlikely to see any such legislation pass in the next year, given the split Congress and intense lobbying from tech companies, says Ben Winters, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. Even the most prominent attempt to create new AI rules, Senator Chuck Schumer's SAFE Innovation framework, does not include any specific policy proposals.

The image above was created via Stable Diffusion with the prompt "lawyers in suits fighting robots with lasers in a futuristic, superhero style." Looks like Matthew Butterick and the Joseph Saveri Law Firm are going to have a busy year! The same folks who filed the class action against GitHub and Microsoft related to Copilot and Codex a couple of months ago, have filed another one against Stability AI, DeviantArt, and Midjourney related to Stable Diffusion. The crux of the complaint is around Stability AI and their Stable Diffusion product, but Midjourney and DeviantArt enter the picture because they have generative AI products that incorporate Stable Diffusion. DeviantArt also has some claims lobbed directly at them via a subclass because they allowed the nonprofit, Large-Scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network's (LAION), to incorporate the art work submitted to their service into a large public dataset of 400 million images and captions.

The research field of Legal Natural Language Processing (NLP) has been very active recently, with Legal Judgment Prediction (LJP) becoming one of the most extensively studied tasks. To date, most publicly released LJP datasets originate from countries with civil law. In this work, we release, for the first time, a challenging LJP dataset focused on class action cases in the US. It is the first dataset in the common law system that focuses on the harder and more realistic task involving the complaints as input instead of the often used facts summary written by the court. Additionally, we study the difficulty of the task by collecting expert human predictions, showing that even human experts can only reach 53% accuracy on this dataset. Our Longformer model clearly outperforms the human baseline (63%), despite only considering the first 2,048 tokens. Furthermore, we perform a detailed error analysis and find that the Longformer model is significantly better calibrated than the human experts. Finally, we publicly release the dataset and the code used for the experiments.

Q2 did not disappoint in the AI and biometric privacy space, with a number of noteworthy litigation, legislative, and regulatory developments having taken place in these two rapidly developing areas of law. Read on to see what has transpired over the last quarter and what you should keep your eyes on as we head into the second half of 2022. As many familiar with BIPA know, currently pending before the Illinois Supreme Court is Cothron v. White Castle System, Inc. (covered extensively by SPB team member Kristin Bryan in CPW articles here, here, here, and here), which is set to provide much-needed certainty regarding the issue of claim accrual in BIPA class action litigation. "Claim accrual" involves when a claim "accrues" or occurs--either only at the time of the first violation or, alternatively, each and every time a defendant violates Illinois's biometric privacy statute. If the Cothron Court rules that BIPA violations constitute separate, independent claims, then the associated statutory damages of $1,000 to $5,000 per violation would compound with each successive failure to comply with Illinois's biometric privacy law.

Google has been sued in the US over claims it illegally invades the privacy of users by tracking people even when they are browsing in "private mode". The class action wants at least $5bn (£4bn) from Google and owner Alphabet. Many internet users assume their search history isn't being tracked when they view in private mode, but Google says this isn't the case. The search engine denies this is illegal and says it is upfront about the data it collects in this mode. The proposed class action likely includes "millions" of Google users who since 1 June 2016 browsed the internet in private mode according to law firm Boies Schiller Flexner who filed the claim on Tuesday in federal court in San Jose, California.