SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) -- A massive, billion-dollar settlement over a copyright class action suit brought by a group of authors against a San Francisco Artificial Intelligence startup was preliminarily approved by a judge Thursday, the Associated Press has confirmed. The potentially landmark $1.5 billion settlement against Anthropic, one of the leading names in SF's nascent AI industry, was brought by the authors over use of their work in the company's training of its AI.

In the lawsuit, the authors alleged nearly half a million books had been illegally pirated to train AI chatbots. The settlement will pay authors and publishers about $3,000 for each of the books covered in the agreement, while not applying to future books.

The deal could mark the first settlement in a string of similar la

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