A recently filed class-action copyright lawsuit against Anthropic, makers of Claude, alleged that the AI company infringed on the rights of authors by using their work in its AI training data. The lawsuit has gone on record as the largest copyright class-action ever certified, with the US District Judge William Alsup allowing up to 7 million claimants to join the lawsuit. According to Wired , not even a month after the suit was filed, the judge has announced that Anthropic and the authors who filed the suit may have come to a settlement in principle.

While the details of the settlement have yet to be finalized and announced, the lawyers representing the claimants are confident that the "historic settlement will benefit all class members." According to reporting by Wired, it seems as though Anthropic may be settling the case precisely to avoid having to go to trial, despite the same judge having previously ruled that using legally-acquired books to train AI models was considered fair use. The case in question seems to hinge on the fact that the way Anthropic obtained some of the books could be considered piracy. Supposedly, Anthropic used as many as 7 million books in its training, which could potentially have amassed damages north of $1 trillion, by some estimates. According to the law firm representing the class of authors, the details of the settlement will be announced in the coming weeks, and there are many proponents of AI who fear that cases like these may set the precedent for similar copyright cases in the future.