The Anthropic Class-Action Lawsuit

Anthropic is an AI company, the creator of the AI tool Claude, which is similar to ChatGPT. If you’re a published author, then this matters to you, because Anthropic has recently settled a class-action lawsuit filed by lawyers on behalf of authors.

Standard disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and nothing I say here should be construed as legal advice. The case is complicated, and I can’t claim to fully understand it all. So this my best attempt to explain the situation in simple terms.

The plaintiffs alleged that Anthropic trained its AI model on books downloaded from two pirate sites, Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. Anthropic denies the claims, but it has agreed to pay out $1.5 billion to authors. The estimated number of books alleged to be used for training Anthropic’s AI is about half a million.

$3000 Per Book

If you’re doing the math here, that works out to a settlement payout of $3000 per pirated book. Some of that money will go to the class-action lawyers. (That’s why they filed the lawsuit.) The rest of the money will go to whoever holds the rights to the pirated books—authors, publishers, and possibly others.

If you published a book that was pirated and used to train Anthropic’s AI model, then you are due for a payout, and it’s fairly easy to register your claim. Details on that are below, but first a few comments. There are a few cases to distinguish:

• If you self-published the book and if you’re the sole author, then the whole payout goes to you. 
• If you self-published a book and if you have some co-authors, then the payout will be split between you, and the group of you have to agree on the split.
• If you published a book with a publisher and if the book has gone out of print and the rights have reverted back to you, then the whole payout goes to you. (If you had co-authors, then the payout is split between you.)
• If you published a book with a publisher and if the book is still in print (so that the publisher still owns the right to publish), then the payout is split between you and the publisher, and the two of you have to agree on the split.

Obviously, there are a lot of possible variations on these, but it all comes down to one thing. Anyone who has a right to a payout will get paid if they file a claim and agree on a split with the others who are due money for the same book.

How To File Your Claim

There are three steps to the process of filing your claim. 

1. If you’re curious, you can learn all about the lawsuit at this website: https://www.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com
2. Find out which of your books are eligible for a payout. There is a search tool on the settlement website that will tell you which of your books are eligible. And it will give you almost all the information you need to file the claim—author names, title of the book, ISBN/ASIN, copyright number, and whether the book is for “education”. I recommend that you copy this info and paste it into a spreadsheet. It’ll make the final step much easier. The search tool is here: https://secure.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com/lookup/
3. File a claim for each book. You can either enter info one book at a time, or you can download a spreadsheet and fill it in and then upload the spreadsheet. The page to file your claim is here: https://secure.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com

Please note that not all your books may be covered in the settlement. If your book was published very recently, it wasn’t used to train Anthropic’s AI model. If your book was not on the pirate websites, then it’s not covered by this settlement. 

But it takes very little time to find out which of your books might be due for a payout and to file your claim. For what it’s worth, let me tell you my own experience with filing a claim.

Less Than An Hour’s Work

I hate doing paperwork, but I’ve now filed my claim, and it took me less than an hour. I have published 12 books in my writing career, and I figured that even one payout would be worth my time. I have author friends who’ve published dozens of books. A few authors I know have published over a hundred! That’s potentially a lot of dinero. But if you don’t file a claim, you won’t get paid.

I entered my name in the search tool and got 8 results back. The results were displayed in a table. I selected all the rows in the table with my mouse and then copied them and pasted the results into a spreadsheet. 

That left 4 of my titles that were apparently not covered. I entered the title of each of the missing 4 books into the search tool. 3 of these gave no results—they’re not covered by the settlement. But the 4^th title returned a result. I copied that and pasted it into my spreadsheet. 

This gave me 9 titles that I had to file a claim for.

1 of these titles is still in print, so I have to share the payout with the publisher. 

1 of these titles was written with a coauthor and the publisher reverted the rights to us, so I have to share the payout with my coauthor but not the publisher. 

7 of the titles were written solely by me, and I either self-published them or the original publisher reverted the rights to me, so the payout is all mine. 

Armed with my spreadsheet, I went to the page to file my claim. 

The first obstacle was that the page asked me for the “Unique ID” provided in the Settlement Notice. I didn’t have this handy, but there was a large button that says “I don’t have a Unique ID” so I clicked that button.

This took me to a page that asked me to fill in the information for each book. The form asked for pretty much everything in my spreadsheet. It also gave me an option to download a spreadsheet to fill in the information. I downloaded it, but the columns were in a different order than my spreadsheet, and there was other infomation to be filled in. I decided just to enter the info manually into the website, since I had only 9 books. 

The whole process went pretty quick. I had two books that required split payouts. The form wants the address and contact information for the publisher or the coauthor. I had to look these up. The one publisher I had to share with has merged with another publisher and moved to a new location, but I found their contact info online. On the form, I requested a 50% split with my publisher. I also requested a 50% split for the book I wrote with a coauthor. 

Looking Forward

I would not be surprised if we see more class-action suits like this in the future. The major AI companies have trained their models on an enormous amount of information which they did not pay for, and for which they had no permission. 

The current lawsuit awarded damages only for pirated books. As I understand it, the judge didn’t award any sort of payout for the ongoing use of authors’ intellectual property. The payout seems to be only for copyright violation. I think this is pretty lame. It would be fairer to pay authors licensing fees for use of their intellectual property. I note that Joe Konrath recently blogged about this, and he’s not a bit happy either.