Humanity told a federal judge on Friday that he agreed to pay $1.5 billion to resolve a class action lawsuit from a group of authors who accused the artificial intelligence company of using books to train AI chatbot Claude without permission.
The plaintiffs in the Humanity and Court applications asked District Judge William Alsup to approve the settlement after announcing the contract without disclosing the terms or amount.
“If approved, this landmark settlement will be the largest publicly reported restoration of copyright in history, greater than the individual copyright cases sued in other copyright class action settlements or final judgments,” the plaintiff said in his filing.
The proposed transaction marks the first settlement of a series of lawsuits against high-tech companies, including Openai, Microsoft and the Meta platform, over the use of copyrighted materials to train generative AI systems.
As part of the settlement, humanity said it would destroy downloaded copies of the books the authors accused of it as pirated, and under the transaction it could face infringement claims related to material generated by the company's AI model.
In a statement, Humanity said the company is “working on developing safe AI systems that help people and organizations expand their capabilities, advance scientific discoveries and solve complex problems.” The contract does not include approval of liability.
Authors Andrea Burtz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson filed a class action lawsuit against humanity last year. They argued that the company, backed by Amazon and Alphabet, illegally using millions of pirated copies to teach AI assistant Claude to respond to human prompts.
The writer's allegations reflect dozens of other lawsuits that say tech companies, including authors, news outlets and visual artists, have stole jobs they use in AI training.
Companies argue that the system will use copyrighted materials fairly to create new, transformative content.
In June, Allsup determined that humanity had used the author's work fairly to train Claude, but the company found that it had violated its rights by saving more than 7 million pirated copies in a “central library” that is not necessarily used for that purpose.
The trial was scheduled to begin in December to determine that there was a suspected copyright infringement, with potential damages potentially reaching hundreds of millions of dollars.
Important fair use questions are still discussed in other AI copyright cases.
Another San Francisco judge heard a similar ongoing lawsuit against Meta shortly after Allsup's decision that using copyrighted work without permission to train AI is illegal in “many circumstances.”
