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

(www.nytimes.com)
989 points acomjean | 1 comments | 05 Sep 25 19:52 UTC | HN request time: 0.239s | source
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arjunchint ◴[05 Sep 25 20:49 UTC] No.45143425[source]▶
Wait so they raised all that money just to give it to publishers?

Can only imagine the pitch, yes please give us billions of dollars. We are going to make a huge investment like paying of our lawsuits.

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non_aligned ◴[05 Sep 25 20:52 UTC] No.45143452[source]▶
You're joking, but that's actually a good pitch. There was a significant legal issue hanging over their heads, with some risk of a potentially business-ending judgment down the line. This makes it go away, which makes the company a safer, more valuable investment. Both in absolute terms and compared to peers who didn't settle.
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1. freejazz ◴[05 Sep 25 21:25 UTC] No.45143806[source]▶
It just resolves their liability with regards to books they purported they did not even train the models on, which is all that was left in this case after summary judgment. Sure the potential liability was company ending, but it's all a stupid business decision when it is ultimately for books they did not even train on.

It basically does nothing for them besides that. Given the split decisions so far, I'm not sure what value the Alsup decision is going to bring to the industry, moving forward, when it's in the context of books that Anthropic physically purchased. The other AI cases are generally not fact patterns where the LLM was trained with copyrighted materials that the AI company legally purchased copies of.