Anthropic will pay at least $1.5 billion to settle a US class action lawsuit over pirated books download to train its artificial intelligence (AI) models, court documents revealed on Friday.

"This settlement sends a strong message to the AI industry that there are serious consequences when they pirate authors' works to train their AI, robbing those least able to afford it," said Mary Rasenberger, CEO of the Authors Guild, in a statement supporting the deal.

Originally published on doc.afp.com, part of the BLOX Digital Content Exchange.