Anthropic agrees to pay $1.5B to settle lawsuit with book authors

Post by privatelypublic » Fri, Sep 05, 2025, 10:12 PM UTC

masterjack wrote: post #75

slg wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe small compared to the money raised, but it is in fact enormous compared to the money earned. Their revenue was under $1b last year and they projected themselves as likely to make $2b this year. This payout equals their average yearly revenue of the last two years.

I thought they were projecting 10B and said a few months ago they have already grown from a 1B to 4B run rate

Post by neilv » Fri, Sep 05, 2025, 10:13 PM UTC

ianks wrote: post #139

neilv wrote: post #121

$1.5B is a nothing but a handslap for the big gold rush companies. It's less than 1% Anthropic's valuation -- a valuation utterly dependent on all the hoovering up of others' copyrighted works. AFAICT, if this settlement signals that the typical AI foundation model company's massive-scale commercial theft doesn't result in judgments that wipe out a company (and its execs), then we have confirmation that is a free-for…

There’s alternatives to wiping out the company that could be fair. For example, a judgement resulting in a shares of the company or revenue shares in the future rather than a one time pay off. Writers were the true “foundational” piece of LLMs, anyway.

Post by verdverm » Fri, Sep 05, 2025, 10:14 PM UTC

Ekaros wrote: post #140

golly_ned wrote: post #104

> "The technology at issue was among the most transformative many of us will see in our lifetimes" A judge making on a ruling based on his opinion of how transformative a technology will be doesn't inspire confidence. There's an equivocation on the word "transformative" here -- not just transformative in the fair use sense, but transformative as in world-changing, impactful, revolutionary. The latter shouldn't matter…

Printing press, audio recording, movies, radio, television were also transformative. Did not get rid of copyright or actually brought them. I feel it is insane that authors do not receive some sort of standard compensation for each training use. Say a few hundred to a few thousand depending on complexity of their work.

Post by unit149 » Fri, Sep 05, 2025, 10:15 PM UTC

Post by carstenhag » Fri, Sep 05, 2025, 10:18 PM UTC

ryao wrote: post #147

dkdcio wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

maybe I’m bad at math but paying >5% of your capital raised for a single fine doesn’t seem great from a business perspective

If it allowed them to move faster than their completion, I imagine management would consider it money well spent. They are expected to spend absurd amounts of money to get ahead. They were never expected to spend money efficiently if it meant taking additional months/years to get results.