Anthropic admits pirating 22 Korean books, agrees to $1.5b settlement - CHOSUNBIZ
It was found that books downloaded from piracy sites for Anthropic's development of the artificial intelligence (AI) model "Claude" included many works by Korean authors, including Nobel Prize in Literature winner Han Kang.
Looking at the list of books released on Anthropic's official copyright settlement website on the 16th, at least 22 works by Korean authors were among the 482,460 works covered by the settlement.
These include three works by Nobel Prize in Literature winner Han Kang—"Human Acts," "The Vegetarian," and "The White Book"—as well as four by Kim Young-ha, including "Your Republic Is Calling You," and three by Shin Kyung-sook, including "Please Look After Mom." In addition, works by Korean authors such as Hwang Sok-yong and Kim Ae-ran were confirmed to be included.
The books in question are those compiled as part of the settlement for a class-action lawsuit in the United States. Three authors, including Andrea Bartz, author of the 2024 bestselling thriller "We Were Never Here," filed a class-action suit claiming that Anthropic reproduced and used their works without permission while developing Claude.
During the lawsuit, it was revealed that Anthropic downloaded more than 7 million digital copies from illegal book-sharing sites in 2021–2022. Anthropic unlawfully obtained at least 5 million books from Library Genesis (LibGen) in 2021 and at least 2 million from Pirate Library Mirror (PiLiMi) in 2022.
A U.S. court determined that the act of using books for AI training itself falls under "fair use" under the Copyright Act. However, the act of downloading and storing pirated copies in the process of obtaining books for training was not recognized as fair use. Accordingly, Anthropic agreed with the plaintiffs to pay a total of $1.5 billion, at about $3,000 per copy, for approximately 500,000 pirated books.
Meanwhile, since 2024 Anthropic has also secured training materials by purchasing large quantities of print books and digitizing them. To that end, it contacted publishing and distribution companies around the world, and Korean company Woongjin Book Centre was reportedly included as a partner.
