Anthropic Begins Distributing $1.5 Billion Copyright Settlement Funds, Authors and Publishers Dispute Allocation

Anthropic reached a settlement in the copyright class-action lawsuit last year. The court ruled that Anthropic's use of copyrighted materials to train AI models was protected under the "fair use" doctrine, making it legal, but using pirated materials did not fall under fair use protection. As a result, Anthropic will compensate the authors of nearly 500,000 pirated works used to train its models, with a compensation standard of $3,000 (approximately 20,203 RMB) per work, totaling $1.5 billion (approximately 10.102 billion RMB) in settlement funds. The settlement plan was finally approved this July, and the compensation payments have since begun.

Publishers Claim More Than Their Share, Authors Question Openly

According to the settlement agreement, if the relevant books are still published by traditional publishers, the compensation will be split equally between the authors and the publishers; if the book is self-published by the author or the publisher has discontinued the book and returned the rights to the author, the full $3,000 compensation should go to the author.

However, recently some authors have posted on social media stating that some publishers seem to be claiming more than their rightful share of the compensation. Suspense and thriller writer April Henry openly questioned HarperCollins, saying that the publisher had claimed compensation for a book she had returned the rights to at least 17 years ago. Additionally, she discovered that HarperCollins had been added to her credit record as an "employer" on the same day, although she had never worked for the company.

Mismanagement of Records, Literary Agencies Also Want a Share

Victoria Strauss, the author of the well-known writers' advocacy blog Writers Beware, said that recent complaints from authors generally fall into two categories: one is that publishers are claiming compensation for works they no longer hold the legal copyright to; the second is that publishers secretly applied for 100% of the compensation, while according to the settlement agreement, they were only entitled to 50%.

However, Strauss believes that such situations usually stem from "poor copyright record management and complex settlement procedures," rather than "publishers deliberately trying to take money." Some publishers have already admitted the claims were incorrect and are requesting corrections from Anthropic.

Behind the Battle of Trillion-Level Computing Power: OpenAI Astra Has Burned Hundreds of Billions of Dollars, Where Are the Gaps Between Domestic Large Models and American Companies?

Recently, Anthropic released Fable5.1, and OpenAI launched Astra, further intensifying the global competition in large models. Although Astra has sparked discussions about its performance and cost-effectiveness, the massive financial and hardware consumption behind it highlights the gap in computing infrastructure between China and the United States. Reports indicate that OpenAI has not disclosed specific parameters, but it has used the StarGate program to train models utilizing over 100,000 NVIDIA GPUs.

Global Top Three AI Platforms Suffer Mass Outage: ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok Suddenly Experience Large-Scale Downtime, All Now Fully Recovered

On September 3rd, the global AI industry experienced a rare collective failure. Mainstream large models such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, Grok, and Claude suffered large-scale outages almost simultaneously, affecting many users' daily usage and workflows. The incident impacted leading large model platforms, drawing significant attention from the industry and users. Technical teams have urgently investigated and repaired the issue.

Broadcom predicts Anthropic and OpenAI will surpass Google to become the top two customers for AI custom chips

Patrick Chi, president of Broadcom, predicts that as large model vendors intensify their competition for computing power, Anthropic and OpenAI will surpass Google to become the top two core customers for Broadcom's AI ASIC business. Anthropic is expected to become the largest XPU custom chip customer by 2027 to 2028, followed closely by OpenAI in second place.

U.S. Government Supports OpenAI: AI Training is a Fair Use, Limiting Copyright Would Harm Technological Innovation

The U.S. government submitted documents to the court, publicly supporting OpenAI's position in its copyright dispute with publishers such as The New York Times. The Department of Justice stated that using news content to train AI models complies with the 'fair use' principle. Previously, The New York Times sued Microsoft and OpenAI in December 2023, accusing ChatGPT and Copilot of using its content without authorization.

Earth's Most Powerful Model Enters Price War! Anthropic Releases Fable 5.1: Performance Soars and Costs Drop by 40%

Anthropic released its new flagship large model Fable 5.1 ahead of its listing, and simultaneously launched Mythos5.1 for Mythos access users. As the core of its product lineup, this model surpasses the previous Fable5 and competitors in multiple benchmark tests, while significantly reducing usage costs. It maintains strong performance, highlighting that the competition in large models is moving toward extreme cost-effectiveness.