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Anthropic owes authors $1.5B for pirating work — but the claims process is a Kafkaesque mess

“Your AI monster ate all our work. Now you’re trying to pay us off with this piece of garbage that doesn’t work.”

Earlier this year, the author Maureen Johnson was fighting with Anthropic.

Specifically, she was wrestling with the Anthropic copyright settlement website.

Johnson is the author of 28 books, most of them YA and many of them bestsellers. The AI company Anthropic owes her an estimated $3,000 per book (to be split 50-50 with her publisher) for several of them. The payouts are part of a first-of-its-kind settlement that was handed down last fall, in which Anthropic admitted that it downloaded millions of pirated, copyrighted books to train its AI models without authors’ permission. (According to the New York Times, “As part of the settlement, Anthropic said it did not use any pirated works to build A.I. technologies that were publicly released.”) A judge found that the use of those books without authorial permission constituted fair use, but the piracy did not. Similar suits are pending against Meta and OpenAI. (Disclosure: Vox’s Future Perfect is funded in part by the BEMC Foundation, whose major funder was also an early investor in Anthropic; they don’t have any editorial input into our content.)

Anthropic owes a class of half a million authors $1.5 billion as a legal settlement for downloading pirated books to train its AI model.

However, Anthropic’s data set was so buggy that authors had a hard time navigating the website set up to administer the claim.

Plus, that $1.5 billion works out to a very small amount for each individual author in the class, particularly after they’ve split the payout with their publishers.

The settlement will go to court for a fairness hearing on May 14.

The class-action lawsuit was intended to even the playing field between individual authors and one of the most valuable companies in the world. To distribute the money to authors, Anthropic and the plaintiff’s lawyers worked with a claims administrator (a company that specializes in managing compensation claims) to set up a website that authors can use to access a small piece of the record-breaking $1.5 billion payout.

But Johnson, like other authors who spoke to Vox, quickly hit a snag: The claims site is glitchy and unreliable, forcing people to jump through endless hoops to collect the money they’re owed. By March, she had already submitted claims for her 14 eligible titles twice, spending 90 minutes each time to painstakingly fill out the forms.

Now, the claims administrator was........

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