AI startup Anthropic will pay a $1.5 billion settlement after being accused of copyright violations and piracy.

Well-known authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson sued the company over what their lawyer calls "brazen infringement."

They alleged, according to the complaint, that "Anthropic downloaded known pirated versions of the works, made copies of them, and fed those pirated copies into its models" to train them.

Richard Drew/AP

"Anthropic is arguing, 'no, this was a transformative work under copyright law.' And transformative just means that the final product is completely different, that it's not infringing on your original work. But then the authors argue, 'but it was our work that created it,'" Nouvelle Gonzalo, who specializes in corporate law, covering

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