On Monday, a court judge approved Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement with writers; an agreement that ended the largest class action copyright case in the field of artificial intelligence and broke the record for the highest copyright compensation.
In May, some writers tried to veto the settlement because the court had ruled that Anthropic's AI training using books constituted "fair use," but it was likely that unlawful use of their works had occurred. Opponents of the settlement believed that writers’ shares were too low and the attorneys’ fees were excessive. They wanted to file separate lawsuits to receive more compensation instead of accepting an approximate payment of $3,000 per work, but only 350 people succeeded in opting out of receiving the compensation.