As OpenAI’s ChatGPT and its imitators exploded onto the world stage over the past few years, they kicked off a series of legal showdowns that are still working their way through the courts.
The New York Times is suing OpenAI. Disney is suing Midjourney. And in a class action case representing potentially millions of writers, book authors are suing Anthropic.
All these cases are orbiting around a central question: what do the creators of modern AI systems — which are trained by ingesting vast amounts of information to find patterns in it — owe the people and organizations that created all that information? It’s an especially fraught question as both AI companies and certain economists warn that AI tech could be poised to replace many of the workers who currently do intellectual labor.
Where all those lawsuits end up, and what new legal precedent they set, is anyone’s guess. The cases involve rarefied questions about free speech, fair use, and the nature of information itself.
But the first major one just found a resolution. That last case we mentioned above, in which the authors of books are suing Anthropic — an AI company founded by OpenAI defectors that offers the ChatGPT competitor Claude — has reached a preliminary settlement that, though we don’t yet know the details, could be a sign of things to come.
US District Judge William Alsup announced this week that Anthropic and the authors “believe they have a settlement,” Wired reports. That’s interesting on its own, because it had seemed until recently that Anthropic was preparing for a knock-down-drag-out fight.
“It’s a stunning turn of events, given how Anthropic was fighting tooth and nail in two courts in this case. And the company recently hired a new trial team,” Santa Clara University law professor Edward Lee, an expert on AI litigation, told the magazine. “But they had few defenses at trial, given how Judge Alsup ruled. So Anthropic was starting at the risk of statutory damages in ‘doomsday’ amounts.”
The potential damages were genuinely epic. According to Wired‘s calculations, the millions of copyrighted books that Anthropic used to train Claude meant that, in a worst-case scenario, it could have been facing a payout of more than $1 trillion — an amount that, even by the outsized financial standards of the AI industry, would almost certainly wipe the company out of existence.
That’s not hyperbole, at least according to industry advocates who griped earlier this month that the suit stood to “financially ruin” not just Anthropic but the entire nascent AI industry.
In the face of those incredible stakes, it’ll be fascinating to see what terms both the suing authors and Anthropic agreed to. According to the court, we’ll learn more after September 3.
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