Anthropic has settled a class action lawsuit with a group of fiction and nonfiction authors. The settlement was announced in a filing on Tuesday with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. This development comes after Anthropic had won a partial victory in a lower court ruling and was in the process of appealing that decision. No details of the settlement have been made public. Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The case, called Bartz v. Anthropic, centered on Anthropic’s use of books as training material for its large language models. The court had previously ruled that this use of the books qualified as fair use. However, because many of the books used were pirated, Anthropic still faced the possibility of significant financial penalties for its conduct connected to the case.
Following the lower court’s decision in June, Anthropic had applauded the ruling and framed it as a victory for generative AI models. The company stated its belief that it acquired books for the sole purpose of building large language models and that the court clearly held such use was fair.