Charles Graeber said he has some positive feelings about being among the three main plaintiffs in one of the largest copyright infringement settlements in history.
"I was proud to be part of a group that showed that a ragtag bunch of authors joined later by publishers could actually hold together as a class, face a Goliath like Anthropic and get a meaningful number out of them," The New York Times bestselling author and journalist told NPR.
But he's also hesitant to call the efforts and outcome of the lawsuit an all-out win.
Graeber is among the more than 300,000 writers involved in the suit who may soon be getting a modest windfall. A federal judge in San Francisco rubber stamped a $1.5 billion settlement in July resulting from a landmark class action lawsuit the authors brought against the AI company Anthropic two years ago.
The AI company agreed to settle after a federal judge ruled last year that it had used the contents of millions of digitized copyrighted books to train the large language models behind its chatbot, Claude, without seeking the consent of or compensating the authors of those works.
Graeber said he is entitled to around $3,100 in compensation for each of the two books he wrote that were used to feed Claude, including The New York Times bestselling true crime book The Good Nurse, which Netflix adapted into a movie in 2022.
The author said the hard cash reaffirms that piracy is a crime. But he has mixed feelings about the last 2-plus years he's spent fighting Anthropic. "A lot of travel, a lot of discussion about what to do and how to proceed and a lot of jobs passed up," he said. "I'm much poorer for this settlement, ironically."
The overall settlement amount may seem large. But thousands of authors are involved, and they have to split the money with the publishers. Also, more than $100 million went to the plaintiffs' lawyers.
And perhaps more importantly, the case could be seen as more of a win for the AI companies than it is for the publishing industry.
A win for the AI industry?
That's because within the narrow terms of this particular lawsuit, the court did not find it illegal for Anthropic to train its AI algorithms on authors' copyrighted works – as long as the company pays for the books it uses.
"Training AI on books is fair use under copyright law," said Aparna Sridhar, deputy general counsel for Anthropic, in a statement to NPR. "More than 91% of authors and publishers covered by the settlement have claimed their share of the payment, and we're looking forward to bringing this matter to a close." The company declined to respond to further questions about the implications of the judge's ruling.
A federal judge also ruled in favor of Meta in a similar case last year involving a group of authors, who included Richard Kadrey and Sarah Silverman. The authors sued Meta, alleging they used pirated copies of their novels to train some of its AI models. Meta claimed fair use and won because the authors failed to present evidence that the tech company's use of their books affected the market for their original work.
AI companies often invoke the fair use doctrine – which enables the use of copyrighted works without the copyright holder's consent in some situations – as they try to make the case in court for training their models on these materials.
New York Times bestselling author Andrea Bartz, another named plaintiff in the Anthropic trial alongside Graeber, said the argument for fair use makes little sense when the algorithms are being used to create machine-authored texts that directly compete with works by human authors on the open market.
"The algorithm is being used to essentially try to put us out of a job," Bartz said.
Threats from abroad
Meanwhile, even if laws in the U.S. eventually give authors stronger copyright protections, there's no guarantee that other countries will play by the same rules.
Intellectual property lawyer Dale Nelson, who was not involved in the Anthropic vs Bartz case but said she follows such matters closely, notes the threat from overseas AI companies, especially the creators of powerful and increasingly popular chatbots like China's DeepSeek.
"The government in China controls in large part what the companies are doing," Nelson said. "So I think that enforcement attempts there would be very difficult."
Bartz said to address this reality, AI regulation needs to move beyond borders, especially as nations compete for political dominance through AI.
Chinese AI companies often use a technique to build their models called "AI distillation." This involves feeding their models the outputs generated by other AI models, often high-quality U.S.-based ones like OpenAI's GPT-4 or Anthropic's Claude, instead of directly training them on pirated copies of books by American authors.
"The only thing that makes sense to me is sort of this non-proliferation agreement, this treaty that could be extended internationally," said Bartz.
But despite the threats, Bartz said she is optimistic about the proliferation of copyright infringement cases involving AI working their way through the U.S. court system, and said authors must keep fighting for their rights.
"My hope is that this lawsuit is the first of many steps that will create a more fair environment for creatives in the era of AI," she said.
Licensing – a possible way forward?
One possible way for authors to get a fairer shake in the age of AI could be through the licensing of their work to AI companies.
"Licensing is a way to make sure that training happens legally," said Umair Kazi, director of policy and advocacy at the nonprofit group, Authors Guild. "Not only that, licensing also enables rights holders to restrict how their works show up in AI chatbot outputs. Maybe you license just for the training, but you don't want the model churning out summaries or other kinds of derivative works – sequels and the likes."
There are already some such deals between publishers and AI companies in place, such as Perplexity AI's agreement with media entities like the Los Angeles Times and Le Monde to license content for the training of its models. There are also online licensing marketplaces, such as Created by Humans.
But it remains to be seen if licensing will take off.
"Because the big AI companies are all in litigation over training, licensing deals are still rare," Kazi said.
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