Genre Grapevine on the Anthropic "Blood-Money" Settlement

The deadline to submit a claim form for the $1.5 billion Anthropic AI settlement recently passed. Despite the settlement being praised as a major win for authors, I still hate it.

As I wrote last year, the settlement doesn’t cover all copyright works, instead only applying to authors who officially registered their books with the U.S. Copyright Office. Almost every other country in the world doesn’t require this registration, so the settlement left out all those authors. Also not included were short story and short-form nonfiction authors, even if their works were officially registered with the copyright office.

In addition, the $1.5 billion settlement is not even a speed bump for Antropic. As Pete Furlong with the Center for Humane Technology has noted, “the same week the settlement was first proposed, Anthropic raised $13 billion at a $183 billion valuation. In effect, Anthropic’s penalty for stealing the creative output and economic livelihood of thousands of authors amounted to less than 1 percent of the company’s total value.”

The best thing I’ve read about the settlement comes from Catherynne M. Valente, whose excellent essay “Blood Money: The Anthropic Settlement“ mirrors how I feel.

To quote:

“I write books that are deeply and profoundly me, usually pretty uncomfortably emotionally available and vulnerable and wordy and out there and experimental—and painfully in love with this world. And they just…took it. They took the best work of my mind and used it to build the very thing that is actively ruining just about everything all the time. They took the books I wrote for children and used them to make it possible for children to not bother with reading ever again. They took the books I wrote about love to create chatbots that isolate people and prevent them from finding human love in the real world, that make it difficult for them to even stand real love, which is not always agreeable, not always positive, not always focused on end-user engagement. They took the books I wrote about hope and glitter in the face of despair and oppression and used it to make a Despair-and-Oppression generator. They took my heart and used it to replace me and everyone else.”

As Valente notes, she has no choice but to accept the blood money from the settlement. Because basically, there are few other options available for writers trying to survive in an expensive, uncaring society, especially when you lack the power and money to fight multi-billion-dollar corporations run by the world’s richest people.

I agree with everything Valente wrote. And I say that as an author whose own stories and books were stolen to train various AI systems.

If you’re an author who was eligible for the settlement, I don’t begrudge you opting into the settlement. Grab the money if you can. And I also understand why many authors and writing organizations supported the settlement, seeing it as the best possible outcome given the current laws and political climate in the U.S.A.

But as a writer, I’m tired of settling for a pittance. I’m beyond exhausted at being told “this is the best you can get.” I’m done with the world’s richest people and companies stealing my stories and acting as if theft isn’t theft when they do it.

As I wrote last year about the settlement, “writers and artists are in a lose-lose situation with regards to not only large corporations and generative AI but also how the world views creative work. For decades artists, writers, musicians and many other creative professionals have been underpaid and marginalized by a cultural outlook that loves and profits from our work but doesn’t want to pay its true value.”

The settlement’s not even a slap on the wrist for Anthropic. A bunch of lawyers got rich, some authors received token money, and AI companies keep doing what they do.

But there’s also another way to see the settlement, as merely one battle in a much longer war over how writers and artists are treated.

As Victoria Strauss ‪posted last week, a law professor has filed an objection to the final approval of the Anthropic settlement and asked the court to “consider 2 critical copyright issues: whether publishers are entitled to payouts, & whether books not copyright-registered were unlawfully excluded.”

It’s also worth noting that while no numbers have yet been released on how many authors signed up for the Anthropic settlement, it’s questionable if the settlement will hit their target of 500,000 works (note this is the number of infringed works, not individual authors). In addition, there was recently pushback from the judges overseeing the case when the plaintiff’s lawyers initially sought to be paid $300 million for their work. These lawyers have since lowered their claim for legal fees to 12.5% of the settlement fund, or $187.5 million.

And speaking of the next battle, late last year six authors filed a new case against Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta, xAI, and Perplexity AI. “The new filing states that the (Anthropic) settlement, which would provide $3,000 to authors and/or publishers, is not enough. The suits state that $3,000 is ‘a tiny fraction (just 2%) of the Copyright Act’s statutory ceiling of $150,000 in addition to attorneys’ fees per willfully infringed work.’ The plaintiffs are indeed seeking $150,000 in statutory damages for each work against each defendant, thus looking for $900,000 in total per work.”

While I don’t like the Anthropic settlement, it’s now essentially a done deal. So let’s focus on fixing the cultural, societal, and legal issues that allow rich companies like Anthropic to steal from us with impunity. We must change how writers and artists are treated by society. We must stop the exploitation and theft of not only our creations but also our very lives by those with power and money.

The Anthropic settlement was merely one battle. There will be many more to come.