At a hearing Monday, US District Judge William Alsup blasted a proposed $1.5 billion settlement over Anthropic’s rampant piracy of books to train AI.
The proposed settlement comes in a case where Anthropic could have owed more than $1 trillion in damages after Alsup certified a class that included up to 7 million claimants whose works were illegally downloaded by the AI company.
Instead, critics fear Anthropic will get off cheaply, striking a deal with authors suing that covers less than 500,000 works and paying a small fraction of its total valuation (currently $183 billion) to get away with the massive theft. Defector noted that the settlement doesn’t even require Anthropic to admit wrongdoing, while the company continues raising billions based on models trained on authors’ works. Most recently, Anthropic raised $13 billion in a funding round, making back about 10 times the proposed settlement amount after announcing the deal.
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